Another Item Off the List -- Plus a Super-bonus, Universal Bucket List Item Check-Off

So I mentioned previously that I was given tickets to Friday night's Mariner game. Which was actually pretty good timing in that a) it's been a couple of decades since I've been to a game, and b) it takes me about ten or twenty years to get over the plutocracy that, despite multiple public votes to the contrary, wound up with the field being built with public funds -- an effective transfer of a few hundred million dollars from the public coffers to the team's owners -- and the fact that despite the public funding, a significant portion of the Seattle public can't afford tickets to the games.

But once you get past all that, I have to admit that it's actually a pretty nice field.

See...

And this was on a night when uncooperative weather kept the roof closed, which is not the best way to see a game. Safeco's definitely better with the roof open.

Unlike the weather, however, the team was very cooperative, scoring nine runs in the second inning. If you're going to put seeing a game on your pointless accomplishments list, you may as well choose a night when the home team wins.

Through truth be told, I actually don't know that they won. When it took sixty-five minutes to get through the first inning, I warned the rest of my part that we likely wouldn't be making it through all nine. 

And we didn't. We left after five -- which was still two-and-a-half hours after the game started.

But none of that is the best part. The best part is that it wasn't even on my list, and I wasn't even trying, but I... 

...got to be on TV. 

And who doesn't want to be on TV before they die?

You can tell from my picture that we had pretty good seats, but what you can't see is that on my left was the eight-year-old (EYO), on his left was his dad, and next to that were two empty seats and then the aisle. At some point, the EYO's dad bought him a gigantic package of cotton candy, and at roughly the same time the jumbotron started playing some song that involved cotton candy. 

At about this point, a cameraman appeared and took the two seats next to the aisle. He explained to the brother-in-law that if the EYO could just naturally watch the game and eat his cotton candy, the cameraman would get him on TV. 

And so began the most humorous seven minutes of the evening, as the cameraman starts trying to compose and manipulate the situation so that everything seems "natural," while, in order, the brother-in-law, the EYO, myself and Sib2 (sitting on my right) do everything we can to make it all seem weird and unnatural as possible. And then, of course, there was a commercial break, so the period requiring normalcy got extended while the cameraman waited for the broadcast to resume. Props to the cameraman for hanging in to get his shot. He definitely worked for it.

And then he was gone, and we didn't really know if we'd made the grade or not. However, the brother-in-law cared enough to stay up and watch the rebroadcast and confirmed that the EYO, myself and Sib2 all made on TV, I think just after the commercial break between the third and fourth innings. 

Which matters not at all except, well, hey, I've been on TV. And so by the modern laws of celebrity, and it's primacy over all other human concerns, it's now okay if I die. 

Even if there's only one person in the world who both knows me and saw the broadcast.