Alaska

Can’t anybody here play this game?

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Here’s a recipe for frugal fun: Go watch some “coach-pitch” Little League. Go even if you don’t have any kids. And go to the bathroom before you leave for the game, or you will almost certainly wet yourself laughing.

Coach-pitch is like an extended bloopers reel on YouTube, minus the annoying music and captions. Think “The Keystone Kops,” only shorter, and with bats instead of billy clubs:

  • Runners piling up two or three deep on third base as coaches scream, “Go back! Go back!” and the third baseman tries to figure out which one to tag.
  • A shortstop singing a little song to herself, complete with hip-twitches, as a series of line drives sails past.
  • The right fielder and center fielder who played catch during the game.
  • A runner dashing almost off the field to avoid being tagged. A few steps more and he’d have been in the bleachers.
  • A catcher, all but blinded by an oversized protective mask, turning around and around in a futile search for a loose pitch that was practically under his instep.
  • Another catcher adjusting his protective cup. From inside his pants.
  • Outfielders waiting patiently for hits to roll all the way to them. Then again, it’s hard to show much hustle when the baseball glove is bigger than your head.

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I travel with mayonnaise.

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Recently I flew to Anchorage, Alaska for a 10-week housesitting gig/visit. I generally go with just a carry-on bag, but my new neck-supporting pillow takes up a big chunk of that bag. I couldn’t stuff much Stuff into the small space where the pillow wasn’t.

A real frugalist just hates to pay checked-bag fees. Were this to have been a short trip I’d have simply used a rolled-up towel under my neck. But 10 weeks is a little long to subject my creaky neck to a tube o’terrycloth. Into the bag went the pillow and into another bag went a bunch of my stuff.

Plus some birthday presents, and some mayonnaise.

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Minor celebrityhood: What’s YOUR dubious claim to fame?

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I miss the Fly By Night Club, a proudly sleazy Alaskan bar that served up Spam and satire in equal doses. Nine months a year the club presented “The Whale Fat Follies,” a musical revue that skewered local and national politics, Martha Stewart, wildlife management policies, the Neiman-Marcus catalog, the official state fossil (that’s the woolly mammoth, not Sen. Ted Stevens), money-grubbing evangelical ministers, opera, squid, Bill Clinton and just about anything else that club owner Mr. Whitekeys figured could get a laugh.

The slide shows usually included at least one naked backside. The male cast members enjoyed the cross-dressing skits just a little too much. Some shows featured the world’s first tap-dancing outhouse, a performer introduced as “the happy tapper in the snappy crapper.”

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