As we were at the Icehouse on Wednesday night for half price pizza and pints night, and to a lesser extent to watch the World Series, he was telling me about the ever expanding universe of Burt Reynolds. Not the mustachioed star of Smokey and the Bandit and Boogie Nights...no, Burt Reynolds is the name my brother uses as his pseudonym.

Seriously. Its been a huge, ginormous inside joke for years, for no other reason than the fact that its utterly ridiculous. I think it started when they lived in Omaha, and we were out at Happy Hour at Nico one Friday night. Across the room from us, there was a mustachioed gentleman in his mid-40s sitting in the corner booth with six young hotties surrounding him. To a large extent because of the mustache, and to a lesser extent because of the ladies half his age surrounding him, my brother mockingly started calling him "Curt Reynolds" -- Burt's fictional brother. It was a Happy Gilmore reference, I believe (Happy saying to himself as a limo pulls up, "Whoa...it must be...Burt Reynolds or somethin'!")

We sat there trying to get "Curt's" attention, yelling his name, seeing if he'd answer. Of course, he didn't, but it still was a lot of fun. We laughed all night about Curt Reynolds, practically mocking the dude right to his face, although he never figured it out, because obviously his name wasn't Curt.

Great thing is you only have to win one week to get all of your money back for the entire season. Bad thing is that I never come close to winning. Well, I may not win the money, but I am undefeated in writing the most entertaining picks emails. Since I'm tired of emailing them to everyone, I will heretofore post them right here on Wood Grains every Friday.

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Winners only, not to be confused with Members Only, designer of fashionable jackets since 1980...

Buffalo (Norv Turner: America's Least Trustworthy Coach in the Eastern Time Zone)

Chicago (If the Vikings pull this one off, I'll eat a plate of "I can't believe its not Polish Sausage". So, you know, Go Bears)

Pittsburgh (Really? The Bengals? Beating anyone? You cannot be serious!)

Tennessee (Lets see. Tony Gonzalez is still a Chief, Larry Johnson is still a punk, the Chiefs still stink. Seems about right.)

St Louis (Upset Special! No Tony "The Finger" Romo? No win!)

Baltimore (Ray Lewis is licking his chops to blow up the wildcat play. Without that the Fins are a warmer version of the Lions.)

NY Giants (JT O'Sullivan still seems more like a bad TV movie of the week actor name than a decent quarterback name. Is it just me?)

New Orleans (Delhomme won't win a shootout with Brees. That's like John Rambo meeting Doc Holliday at high noon. Lots of shots, lots of excitement, but ultimately the old guy with a surgically repaired shoulder loses.)

Houston (One team sucks, the other one merely stinks. You can always cover your nose, but when you suck, you suck. Texans win.)

NY Jets (Remember what I said about Doc Holliday? Yeah, Al Davis was the kid who loaded his firearm with gunpowder back in the day.)

Indianapolis (I would rather lose money than pick Green Bay to win.)

Washington (Losing to the Rams has to piss you off, right? Right?)

Tampa Bay (Who are Seattle's receivers these days? Does Steve DeBerg have kids?)

New England (Points: if Brady was playing, 142. With Cassel, it'll be more like 47)

Now, I'll be damned if I didn't win $40 on the damn thing. I'm not greedy, and I don't need to win the Powerball jackpot to be happy. In fact, I don't know if I'd want that much coin. Seems like a lot of work. But $40, hell, that made my night. As one of my friends told me, that's half a tank of gas and a six pack. Actually, in my economical car $40 buys a full tank of gas, a six pack of beer, a bag of Chili Cheese Fritos, and a magazine. That's a whole evening of entertainment right there! You bet.

On Tuesday, I was on my way back to the office from a photo shoot around lunchtime, and I made the ill-fated decision to pull into McDonalds for a burger. However, the Monopoly game is going on right now, a fact of which I was blissfully unaware. This is a bad thing, I can assure you, for I'm obsessed with it. Always have been. In the three seconds that it took to see, read and comprehend the advertisement for the game, I went from desiring a $1 double cheeseburger to a $6 combo meal with large everything so that I could get more Monopoly pieces.

Its pathetic, I know this is what you're thinking right now. Would it change your mind if I told you that on my box of fries, I pulled off the "Water Works" utility gamepiece, which is worth an instant $50 cash?

That's right, for the second straight day, I lucked into a small amount of unexpected cash money. Good lord, I'm the luckiest bastard alive. While others suffer, I celebrate. Give me a second while I slap myself square in the face for being arrogant, overly lucky and boastful.

You bet.

The doorbell rang again. Hmm. I didn't smell smoke, but nonetheless, two doorbell rings are two doorbell rings. So with toothbrush in hand, I sauntered over to the window in my bedroom and looked out to see who was ringing the doorbell twice.

Ooh! It was my crazy neighbor with the handmade craft "W" sign in her garden, her personal tribute to our greatest (sic) President ever. When I bought the house, the sign was accompanied by a secondary one that had "STILL President!!" painted on it. So it was a conceptual piece, really. You had the red white and blue "W", with each leg of the W a different color, and the message banner next to it. W...STILL President!! Take that, you silly people who voted for him by accident! Ahahahaha!

Ahem.

Consider this: what other team could be involved in the most exciting Monday Night Football game of the year and the resulting response from three die-hard fans is this:

"Great, now we have to watch 'em next week."

After the event, the board went out to dinner with the judges at Mark's in Dundee. I love this restaurant; it my go-to place for taking the ladies to a nice dinner. Why do I give it "go-to" status? Because its the kind of restaurant where you can have a nice, elegant dinner with a date and still order a bowl of Macaroni and Cheese. Actually, their Gourmet Mac and Cheese with a glass of wine is pretty much the greatest thing you will ever consume.

All of which made the surprising discovery that the restaurant has a private top floor all the more shocking. As many times as I've been there, I had no clue there were private dining rooms upstairs. There are two of them, with big giant family-style dining room tables in each. It was around one of these tables that 12 of us sat around, like a big giant family.

A couple of weeks ago, I discovered that there is a park only one block from our office. Why is it that I never knew this, despite working in the neighborhood for almost four years? Our street is a dead end, and the park is on the "dead" side -- so I never drove by it before. I recently ran the math, and figured that if I stopped driving home for lunch I could save two tanks of gas a month, or roughly $70. That's one helluva lot of beer.

But this year, ooh ho, this year I wore it three days in a row last week. For three straight games, the Twins beat the team they were trailing in the standings and by the end of the third game, had taken over first place. The oversized authentic Twins jersey had something to do with it, I'm sure.

With the Twins and White Sox in a one-game, Winner Take All playoff tiebreaker game, of course the oversized authentic Twins jersey had to make a fourth appearance. Of course it did.

But I didn't stop there. I stopped by Hy-Vee and picked up my "Lucky Pizza", which is a 12" Traditional Crust Beef pizza. Seriously, you laugh but the Lucky Pizza never fails me. I'm convinced if I ate the Traditional Crust Beef Pizza from Hy-Vee every day, my life would be one continuous stream of domination. I would probably be a head of state by now. But the tradeoff would be that I would weigh 600 pounds and have to wear bed sheets for pants, with clothes pins strategically placed to fashion makeshift legs out of the bed sheet.

No, much like the oversized authentic Twins jersey, I only dine on the 12" Traditional Crust Beef Pizza from Hy-Vee a few times a year. It too has never failed me. Just imagine, the forces of the jersey and the pizza combined! My enemies scarcely dare give it utterance; the mere thought makes them queasy.

You know its bad when my brother calls me hoping for calm, because usually I'm the one wildly bouncing off walls. "Who the hell are these jokers they got from the Mets?" he asked me. I tried to explain to him that they were good prospects, and that he shouldn't rush to judge them because he didn't know who they were.

After all, the Twins had done this sort of thing before, and had come out better off more often than not. Heck, they'd even done it with the Mets before, trading defending Cy Young Award winner and World Series MVP Frank Viola in 1989 for five prospects -- three of which were key pieces to the Twins World Champion two years later.

They'd done it to the Yankees, trading the best leadoff hitter in the game in the prime of his career, Chuck Knoblauch, for four prospects -- two of which were cornerstones to their three-year playoff run from 2002-04.

My opinion was that they'd done it again -- and that one or more of the prospects would be key pieces to a winner in 2010 when their new ballpark opens.

This is notable only because it wasn't that long ago that I would record games when I had other plans and then watch them in their entirety, sometimes staying up until 2am doing so. Now I can't even sit still long enough to watch a game live.

Ask Jack Bauhaus about it. He was over at my place to watch the Packer-Viking Monday Night game a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn't even sit still with someone else in the room watching the game with me.

Well, for this Twins-White Sox series, I'm going to attempt an experiment. I am going to sit in my most comfortable chair before the first pitch, and I will not get up out of that chair until the end of the game. My laptop, my phone and the latest issues of my magazines will all be safely out of reach. I need to prove to myself that it is still possible for me to focus on a game without doing three other things at the same time. I doubt I can do it, but I have to at least try.

Long before the Bush Doctrine, I had my own Max Univers Doctrine which applied to baseball players. Just as Bush unilaterally claims countries are either "with us or against us", I have long said that baseball players are either "playing for the Twins or against the Twins." What that means is that anyone who plays for the Twins is cool, and anyone who doesn't is a punk. Period.

And it doens't matter if a player used to play for the Twins, and has moved on elsewhere. One he leaves, he's dead to me at least in terms of rooting interest. For example, Jack Morris played for the Tigers for many years during the '80s, and pitched against the Twins in the 1987 playoffs. At the time, he was a bum. Then he played one year for the Twins and led them to a World Series title. For that one year, he was a great guy. Then he left and signed with Toronto, and he was a bum again. I remember booing him just seven months after his epic Game Seven performance for the Twins, purely because he was now the enemy.

My college roommate John will recall me turning my back on Chuck Knoblauch when he demanded a trade out of Minnesota. As the Twins best player, I had a Knoblauch poster on my dorm room wall (amongst other, more *ahem* collegiately appropriate wall decorations). The day he left the team for the Yankees, that poster came down. My memory is a little hazy, but I think I recall a game of Triple Play 98 on Playstation where I made the opponent play as the Twins, and then threw four consecutive pitches at Virtual Chuckster's head.

In more recent times, you have the cases of Torii Hunter and Johan Santana, both of whom departed over the offseason. In Hunter's case, I pretty much thought he was a punk even though he played for the Twins, due to his constant public ripping of teammates and management. In Santana's case, he got the Knoblauch treatment.

My Santana jersey t-shirt went to Goodwill in February. The next month, when I was playing against my brother in a game on the Wii, he played as the Mets. Santana blew out his elbow in the third inning, and I cheered. Doesn't matter that he is the greatest pitcher of his generation and his best years came with the Twins. He plays elsewhere now, so its of no concern to me.

That's why I can't play Fantasy Baseball (among other more sensible reasons, time being chief among them). I can't root for players on other teams. Not in baseball. No sir.

You bet.

Why, you ask, do I hate a team that is an afterthought in their own city? Its simple, really. The Pale Hosers are in the same division as the Twins, meaning the teams play 19 times during each 162 game season. That's just a shade under 10% of the entire schedule (8.5% for you math dorks). When you play that many times against a team that year in and year out you battle for the division title, a certain hatred develops. Its bound to.

Plus, there's this: the Sox make it so easy to hate when they supply a continual string of anti-Twins quotes to the media. Hell, pitcher Mark Buehrle has supplied even stuff on his own to make Clubber Lang blush. My favorite was in 2003 when, after the Twins passed the Sox in the second-to-last week of the season en route to a come-from-behind division title, Buehrle told the media it was a shame the best team from the division missed the playoffs. To top it off, he said he would enjoy watching the Twins lose in the first round, because he was so unimpressed with them he was sure they would. Never mind that they did. Buehrle instantly went from punk to uber-punk, forever. And as you know, it is possible to receive redemption from the Max Univers Court of Punk Behavior. But once you move into uber-punkdom, there is no return.

The unfortunate drawback to this commoditization of the word "Crazy" is that when it actually applies, people believe you're just giving someone a hard time. I bring this up because of an encounter that I had with a gentleman over my lunchhour one day this week who actually was crazy. As in, medically, clinically insane. And when I told people about this when I got back to the office, they mistook "Crazy" for crazy -- because I throw around the phrase "crazy guy" like the Brothers Manning throw the pigskin.

This, of course, significantly reduced the impact of said story, which is a damn shame because its amazing. After the jump -- I shall introduce you to the dude who tried to save my life from, ahem, Russian spies. No, seriously, Russian spies.

Not a bad workbench, if I do say so myself. You bet.

For the first time that I can remember, I wasn't able to watch the game on TV, thanks to the ridiculous Big Ten Network deciding to televise it. As my Grampa in Minnesota, who also doesn't receive the network and has missed watching his Gophers, "I'm back to listening on the radio; its like we've gone back in time twenty years."

I agree. Although listening to the radio does its perks, among them the ability to watch another game on a muted TV. You know, games like any of the various blowouts that ESPN and ABC showed.