I read Bill Simmons for a long time. He's written some funny articles, and his nomination of Bo Jackson as the greatest video game athlete of all time is absolutely right.

And he was cool, years ago, when the Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots all sucked. He'd talk about his beloved local teams now and then, but it wasn't anything I couldn't ignore.

But when they started doing well, it became quite clear that he would be better off writing for the Boston Globe and not something national. Well, maybe he wouldn't be better off, but we would. He couldn't go a paragraph without mentioning his teams. And I actually used to like the Pats and the Sox - my grandmother spends a lot of time in New England, so she got to root for both teams a bit, and since they were both terrible for a long time, I was happy to root for them when they weren't playing the Orioles or Redskins.

And then they got good. You, Red Sox fans, are some of the most annoying in all of sports. Some of you, the real die hards, are okay. But most of you have been waiting years, not for your team to be as good as the Yankees, but for you to have the excuse to be as annoying as Yankees fans. It only took one World Series victory to turn you from lovable underdogs into Yankees fans who wear red.

But back to Simmons. He had an internship contest that my brother entered. He went to great lengths to explain how he was going to choose the winner, and then ignored all his rules and chose someone who simply aped his style.

I stopped reading him completely a few years ago. I just got tired of him talking about his favorite teams all the time. I'd stop reading an article as soon as he started to gush about a Boston team, and pretty soon there wasn't much for me to read.

Many of you may have read this article, which I did not, but apparently it's not flattering to the Celtics. The wife directs me to this response from Celtics Blog.

From here on out: Stop It. Just Stop. We no longer want you talking about our team publicly. You've lost all credibility with Celtics fans. All of it. Don't bother with some lame and dumb reverse jinx excuse to explain your writing. And really, spare us the joyous article after we do win the title. None of us want to hear about it from Showtime Simmons. Enjoy rooting for Kobe, we hope you'll be happier sitting next to Diane Cannon, just don't tell us about it.

I hope he takes it to heart. He has to decide if he's really a fan, in which case he should write for a Boston area publication and love his teams no matter what, or he can be a national columnist and pretend he cares about other teams in the league (Aside from, apparently, the Lakers).

And speaking of the Celtics (The one team from Boston I still like, because the wife loves them and I never had a basketball team I cared about), I actually agree with Mike Wilbon for the first time in a while - the offensive foul on Paul Pierce that they called on his late three point attempt was absolutely awful. I'm glad it didn't end up affecting the outcome, because it was just terrible. Tayshaun Prince jumped in the air and landed on Pierce while he was shooting and somehow it's an offensive foul? Crazy.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to game 1 on Thursday. Unlike Simmons, I actually want the Celtics to win, and think they can do it. It'll be tough - LA is a great team. But it can be done, and it can be done by the Celtics.

Edit to add: An LA fan thinks that Simmons sucks, too.

I tried out Fedora for a few minutes. The Gnome desktop looks just like Ubuntu. I'm going to do some research and see what the real differences are.

When I rebooted into Ubuntu, I had some upgrades to install, which I did. One of them popped up this message:

A security certificate which was automatically created for your local system needs to be replaced due to a flaw which renders it insecure. This will be done automatically.

If you don't know anything about this, you can safely ignore this message.

That's pretty awesome.

ESPN - Papa John's to offer Cleveland residents 23-cent pizzas

Papa John's Pizza issued an apology to Cleveland and the Cavaliers for making T-shirts with LeBron James' number and the word "crybaby" under it.

Who's the marketing person in Washington who decided this would be a good idea? I suppose I could probably find him or her by doing a resume search on Careerbuilder for marketing resumes added in the last two days.

Since I've watched more basketball this year than any other year in my lifetime because of the Celtics-fan wife, I have a better idea of what a hard foul is than I used to. And the little montage ESPN put together of the Wizards pounding on LeBron was pretty ridiculous. So I don't blame him for complaining a bit. And I doubt he's crying now, as he's headed to Boston on Tuesday while Brendan Heywood is headed to play golf.

I was just looking through my Gmail spam folder, which I do from time to time to see if it caught anything it shouldn't have. I'm mostly curious - anything that gets caught in there is probably not worth reading anyway.

But one email jumped out at me - someone named Zane Gay (Not the author, that's Grey) sent me an email entitled, "Fondle all her internal nerve endings".

Maybe this guy should be an author, because he's got a way with the English language, I'll tell you. Maybe he should be a poet, instead. The rigid constraints of prose could never hold Zane Gay back.

I hope someone out there was sitting on his couch, thinking to himself, "Gosh, Jane sure is a great girl. I really want to fondle all her internal nerve endings, but HOW?". And then he happens to look in his inbox and see this gift from Zane Gay. That's the way the world should work.

After watching a batter and a half of the Tigers and White Sox game, the wife now knows why Fire Joe Morgan exists (She's a Tigers fan, as a Michigan native).

I can't reproduce the quote verbatim, but I can give you the gist. Morgan is talking about Miguel Cabrera, and how the guy is a total failure because he only has two hits, one a home run, in his first 14 at bats of the season. I mean, plainly the guy is done. We should probably take him out back and shoot him. No 25-year-old with 139 career home runs and a 143 OPS+ should be allowed to exist if he only gets two hits in his first 14 at bats of the year.

So Morgan is telling us how terrible Cabrera is. He says some ridiculous things that don't mean anything, and then he says:

[Cabrera] is confused on the count, he thinks it's 3-1 instead of 3-2. Since it was 2-2, he had to [do something that one would do on 2-2 and not 3-1. I don't even know.]

Seriously. He barely took a breath in between "it's 3-2" and "it's 2-2". This is not something that one might need to think hard about. The number of balls and strikes is displayed prominently all over the stadium. There is no doubt that there is a screen in front of Morgan's face that tells him the count.

I feel like this is my repayment to the wife - she's gotten me into Celtics basketball, and I've gotten her to appreciate the wonders of Joe Morgan.

This is her reaction after literally FOUR batters of Morgan's commentary.

I don't even listen to him anymore. I can't. I don't understand what he's saying.

Worried the sun is going to explode? Think the terrorists might actually win? Afraid that, by the time we actually get a real President, we might have lost ALL of our civil rights?

Worry not. The answer is tequila.