So, the fiancée and I were bored and decided we didn’t want to waste a beautiful Saturday indoors. We decided to take a drive and see where it led us. This is something we both enjoy immensely: just toddling along aimlessly until we find something interesting.

Well, we drove to the southwest: through Arlington and into Fort Worth. We were heading southwest on 377 when we saw some massive ex-Air Force planes (specifically a C-119 Flying Boxcar, among others). We turned around and discovered the so-called Pate Museum of Transportation.

Anyways, I waltz right in and suddenly OHMYGODLOOKATALLTHEBEAUTIFULCARS!!!!!!!!! After Kelly revived me after I passed out and I wiped up the drool, I quickly set about to take some pictures and didn’t stop until the guy who ran the place was getting ready to close up for the day. So, without further ado, some pictures of beautiful cars (click through to get to the Flickr set):

Baseball starts in five days. I am a cappy hamper.

Now, if my beloved Rangers follow the pattern from previous seasons, my hopes for a pennant will likely be fading by June and dashed by August, but there’s always hope.

One day the Rangers will be good and the city of Dallas will suddenly be enraptured by their play. And on that day, I will ask them where they’ve been for the past 35-odd seasons. It’s sort of like how everybody in this town is suddenly a Mavericks fan. I wonder where all of them were five years ago.

Anyways, not to be deterred, I’m posting what looks (right now—it could easily change in the next five days) to be the opening day roster, more for my personal recollection, rather than for anybody reading this here. I mean, I know I’m probably the only Rangers fan here. But that’s okay. Someday they’ll be good, and I’ll ask where you’ve been.

Starting Lineup
1. CF Kenny Lofton
2. LF/DH Frank Catalanotto
3. SS Michael Young
4. 1B Mark Teixeira
5. DH/RF Sammy Sosa
6. 3B Hank Blalock
7. LF/RF Nelson Cruz
8. C Gerald Laird
9. 2B Ian Kinsler

Starting Rotation
1. Kevin Millwood
2. Vicente Padilla
3. Brandon McCarthy
4. Robinson Tejeda
5. Jamey Wright

Bullpen
Eric Gagné (closer)
Akinori Otsuka (setup man)
Joaquin Benoit (possible long man)
Scott Feldman
Kameron Loe (possible long man)
Ron Mahay (situational lefty)
C.J. Wilson (situational lefty)

Backups
Brad Wilkerson (OF)
Joaquin Arias (IF) Jerry Hairston Jr. (OF/IF) (Arias will start season on DL)
A backup catcher (Probably Miguel Ojeda, this hasn’t been decided yet)
Another backup bench player (Probably Matt Kata because he’s hit really well in ST)

And that’s it. I’m interested to see how this shakes out by the end of the season.

UPDATE: for those who aren’t as familiar with the ongoing trials of being a Rangers fan, this article on Deadspin (written by the blogger at Lone Star Ball) sums up our beloved Rangers history succinctly (and talks a bit about this season).

Best Buy is buying Speakeasy.

Nothing good will come of this. They’re going to run it into the ground just like they did with Geek Squad and we will have lost one of the exceedingly-rare competent DSL providers in the world.

Setting: RB has just finished reading this some twenty minutes after the events of that post…

RB: So [grinning mischeviously], did you actually move the stuff from the washer to the dryer?
KC: [Does something that most Americans wouldn't do without the protective safety of an automobile when someone cuts them off in traffic.]

Blogs: how did couples fight before them?

This post is for people who used to read old incarnations of my blogs. The rest of you: at ease.

I know there are still a few of you out there, valiantly leaving my old RSS feeds in your assorted newsreaders to sit and collect like so much dust in the hope that someday I might return. I’ve been monitoring your every movement, your every successive attempt to find my old feeds.

Well, here I am! I have redirected all old feed addresses to the new feed address in the hopes of catching a few of you and rewarding your ever-faithful diligence in hoping for my return to the internet. If you’d like to update your feed addresses (and save me a few bytes of bandwidth every time in the process), please update your feeds to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadicalBender.

I shouldn’t complain about comment spammers. Not only is that sooo 2004, but apparently, from looking at by statistics, you make up 97% of my recently-rereleased site’s traffic.

But, I’m going to complain anyway. First: background.

This site, radicalbender.com, has been on the internet off and on in various forms for about five years now. About six months ago, it went dark (as previously mentioned). Well, I was hoping to relaunch this site here with a clean break from that old version.

So, I’m looking through the stats of my embryonic site, and what do I see? Page after page of requests of files that existed on my old site. You see, the comment spammers are just blindly hunting and pecking for my old files, trying to find the pages I used to have set up so that they could peddle their illegal male enhancement products, low-cost internet gambling scams and subprime home mortgage refinancing on my site without my permission. But get this, THEY’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR MONTHS, WASTING BANDWIDTH ON A SITE THAT WASN’T EVEN UP. (Not to even mention the fact that in the final year of my previous active site, I had disabled the old commenting form because of this very problem. In other words, they couldn’t possibly have spammed my site in over a year and a half but that wasn’t going to stop them from wasting everybody’s bandwidth—including theirs—to try.)

Worse yet, it’s not just comment spammers: out-of-control blog aggregators and search engine spiders are still trying to index old pages. And idiot message board kids are still trying to hotlink to my long-gone anime avatars DESPITE BEING TECHNOLOGICALLY PREVENTED FROM DOING SO AT THE ONSET.

Of course, this is the point where my fiancée kind of stares at me with the same look I would get if I’d tried to explain the fundamental principles of differential equations or the infield fly rule to a golden retriever. They don’t know what I’m talking about, but they love me anyway.

Well, I thought I’d start out this blog by talking a little bit about the biggest change in my life from the past few months:

I’ve made the switch to Caffeine Free Coca-Cola.

No wait, I met a beautiful woman and decided to upgrade her to fiancée.

Her name is Kelly Shannon (with some deliberation as to her last name). I first met her when I was middle school some 15 years ago now. After a period of “going out with her” (she was my first kiss), we eventually decided to go our different ways as we were being sent to different high schools. We touched base here and there, but ultimately we had our separate lives.

Remarkably, our lives, although they were separate, paralleled each others’ very closely. We were band nerds in high school and we both had little sisters who came behind us who ended up also being band nerds and also drum majors. We graduated high school and were both pressured to attend college (me: Texas A&M, her: Texas Tech). We both attended for exactly one semester before realizing that this was not what we wanted to do. We came back home, lived at home briefly but both came to the conclusion that it was too weird and awkward to live back at home, so we both ended up making poor relationship decisions that were mostly a result of wanting to be out of the house (although, in a divergence here, her decision ended up with a ring while mine didn’t). My relationship fell apart quickly, hers more slowly, but we both ended up being…lost, relationally.

She contacted me on MySpace last August. We bonded together very quickly. We knew we were in love within weeks.

And here we are. We fit together very well: our sames are sometimes mind-blowing (in a Lincoln and Kennedy kind of way) but even our differences allow us to complement each other in a way I’ve never experienced. Neither of us has ever had a love like this.

Man, I’m getting all mushy on only my second post. If that doesn’t persuade you of the change in my life, nothing will.

Okay, let’s never do that again.

Let’s see what happened the past six months or so…(skims CNN.com)…apparently Anna Nicole Smith died and…not much else, I guess. Britney shaved her head, something about a change of power in Congress…kinda sketchy on details.

God, what are archaeologists going to think happened in this country from 1995 through 2010 by watching CNN?

Hi! Did you miss me? Because I missed you.

Nothing much happened here. Still working for my company. Moved to a new apartment…fell in love and about to marry a girl…clipped my toenails several times.

What’s that? Oh yeah, right. I fell in love with a girl (I fell in love at once and almost completely) and we’re going to be married very soon.

Go figure. Bet no one saw that one coming. Well, unless you’ve seen my MySpace page lately, I guess.

Anyways, I’ll run down through the events leading up to that later. Just wanted to get this site back up first.