Better Know A Citizen - cheaptoy
Posted by Andrew on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 7:06 am
Name: Cheaptoy
Hometown: Stillwater, MN
Town I Currently Live In: Edgerton, WI
Profession: Product Engineer – Homogenizers at APV in Lake Mills, WI (right near the Tyranena brewing company, for those lucky enough to have tasted their stuff.)
Bats: R
Throws: R
Positions: 2B, RF
Greatest Career Achievement in Baseball/Softball/T-ball: Getting out of the way of the SS as he completed a 6-3 double play in Madison rec softball. I also hit a triple in 9th grade, that was awesome. I’ve never hit a home run, though, not even in rec league.
Hobbies: Brewing up tasty beverages (I’m award winning, even), bowling (2007-08 league champions), disc golfing. Madison’s been a great place for all three hobbies.
What are you known for around the WGOM? Not sure, probably for helping to increase the length of game logs through brewing discussions with Meat. Also, health problems.
If you could have a nice, polite dinner with any 3 people - dead or alive - who and why? I’m terrible with these types of questions, so I just gave up.
Sports Allegiances: Twins and Vikings.
Favorite Books: Fantasy/Sci-fi stuff, tops being Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, Foundation series, anything in the Discworld series, Dune, etc.
Favorite Music: Heavy Metal. I’m pretty narrow-minded here, I have to admit.
Favorite Baseball Movie: Major League – though to be honest, I couldn’t really think of any other baseball movies that really stand out.
Favorite Non-baseball Movie: Lord of the Rings (I consider all three to be one)
Favorite Food & Drink: Beer, especially if I made it. (I admit to a bit of an ego on this one.) As for food, egg and ham breakfast sandwiches with Tabasco. I’d eat those at every meal if I didn’t think the cholesterol would kill me.
Favorite TV Show(s): Futurama, Deadliest Catch, Psych, Dirty Jobs, House, and Firefly even if it isn’t on anymore.
Favorite Twins Player: Hrbek, mainly because I fixed his laptop once and signed his baseball wallpaper. Also, he was playing Medal of Honor at the time, which was funny to see for some odd reason. (One of those, you had to be there moments.) Oh yeah, and I used a pair of his (unused) batting gloves when I played in 8th and 9th grade. (I use a pair that Gardy gave me now.)
Favorite Twins Player, currently: Neshek, for the perceived social awkwardness. (and the fact that he’s awesome.)
Best Twins Memory: The first time I convinced my fiancee to go to a baseball game. We went to Miller Park, tailgated, and the Twins kicked the crap out of the Brewers. It was made all the more awesome because some chick was leaving in the 8th inning, obviously drunk, yelling at us about how the Twins suck while they were up 8-1. That was awesome because my fiancée decided she enjoyed baseball games, and would go again. Otherwise, I was at the Dome for Silva’s 74 pitch CG against the Brewers. That was awesome, too.
Favorite Sport to Play: Bowling…. easily. It’s the one sport where I am better than all of my friends.
Favorite Sport to Watch: Football, with baseball being a close second. I also bore the crap out of my fiancée by watching bowling on Sundays.
If I could live anywhere in the world, I'd live in: Wisconsin, I love it here, man. Other than that, I’d probably find myself completely content living somewhere in England.
If I was commissioner for a day, I'd: Contract the White Sox. Man I hate the White Sox (and all Chicago sports teams, really.)
If I had Bill Smith's job I'd: Demote the entire big league team to Beloit so I could watch them in person more often.
Favorite Ballpark: I’ve only been to two, so I suppose it has to be Miller Park, although it really sucks without the chalet and beer mug. (which is at least still in Milwaukee at the Lakefront Brewery.) The ability to get beer from Lakefront or New Glarus makes up for that.
Favorite blogs: The WGOM, Gleeman, Fire Joe Morgan, Seth Speaks. I also check out the Strib blogs daily, and sometimes read the comments….. and I always forget why I decided to do that.
Can you give a quick rundown of some of your favorite home brews? Probably the best all around beer I made was a Belgian Triple using coriander seeds and cloves. I also made a California Common (Anchor Steam) that was amazing, a delicious Bavarian style lager, a very nice refreshing hefeweizen, and I won third place in a stout contest with a coffee stout.
Where were you when you saw Hrbek playing MoH? It was in his basement.
When and where are you and your fiancee getting married? We are having everything in the Wisconsin Dells at the Wilderness resort September 26th, 2009.
What's the best part about experiencing a game in Beloit? I haven't had a chance to get out to Beloit to take in a game. This is my first summer in the area, and with a new house and job, it's been busy. I'm hoping to get down there next weekend though, for a game against the Timber Rattlers
OK, this requires the unprecedented Phase III in BKAC questioning - Why were you in Hrbek's basement? I was at his house to fix his laptop My mom's significant other is fishing buddies with Hrbek. (he was on the show once or twice.)
Map time!
Click on map for larger image.
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How long have you been brewing? What kinds of beer do you brew? Specialties?
It'll be three years this October (of which there is only one.) I started off brewing a lot of stouts and porters, because I wasn't very good at making lighter beers anything other than cloudy. I'm finding I'm pretty good at Belgian styles (dubble, triple, farmhouse.) and pilsners. The only two styles I've been unable to do well are browns and scotch ales, which is too bad because I love a good scotch ale.
Have you tried the scotch ale recipe from Northern Brewer? A friend of mine made a mini-mash of it last year and it was mighty tasty.
I may give it a try. If mine turns out to not be might tasty, then I'll know its something I'm doing. I suspect it has to do with fermentation conditions and the yeast I use. (white labs edinburgh) They always seem to have a consistent off flavor that I just can't put my finger on.
Made Northern Brewer's Trippel coupla years back. Lot's of compliments - prolly my best batch so far.
1) how are at Wii bowling?
2) how could Peter Jackson end LotR:FotR the way he did? Frodo leaving the fellowship after the attack by the Uruk-hai? He would never knowingly leave his friends in the lurch! I can (barely) live with all the Liv-love, but not that.
if I could edit my comments like before, I'd have corrected it to "how are you at Wii bowling?"
I'm not nearly as good at Wii bowling. I refuse to do the straight and hard shot that everyone seems to only want to do. I insist on going for a big hook, which ends up being difficult to reproduce time an again on that thing. I do have a 244 under my belt, though.
I'm willing to forgive Jackson on pretty much all the changes he made, just because he still managed to capture the awesomeness that's there.
I'm not a good bowler, but when I first got the Wii and did bowling, then went to my league it messed up my throw and I was throwing a good 20 pins below average. So I've more or less decided Wii bowling isn't for me...
I've been tempted by the George Martin books, but haven't taken that plunge yet.
I highly recommend them if you're into that sort of thing. The only thing that sucks is waiting for Martin to finish the next book (and the series before he can no longer write.)
Give the Don Martin books a try sometime.
So now we know why journalists are so bitter towards bloggers. Bloggers are living a much closer life (sitting in their basement playing video games) to the athletes they revere so much.
And I'm not even a blogger. Although according to the ESPN and Strib comments section, commenting on a blog makes me one.
Hrbek plays Medal of Honor? Awesome! WWII FPS games rule. I had every one of the MOH games available on PC up until Airborne came out last year (all the Call of Duty, too). So, how stupid was it to develop a game that can only be played on video cards supporting DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0? Gee, I have an idea, let's just ignore about 80 percent of the potential market for our game. I wonder how much EA got in kickbacks from ATI and Nvidia for doing that.
We used to play a lot of MoH: Allied Assault: Breakthrough on the LAN in the dorms. 2nd Florr (REPRESENT!) vs 4th Floor. We'd all have our doors open and be yelling instructions up and down the hall. The girls at the other end of the hallway though we were being super-childish. They may have had a point.
My sophomore year in undergrad, we played a ridiculous amount of Starcraft. I had a spreadsheet that we used as a ranking system so that we could pick teams automatically. This was partially to eliminate people having to get picked last, but mainly because it otherwise took too damned long to choose up teams. (Plus, who else was going to be the Bill James of Starcraft?)
Our trick to keeping the girls from calling us childish was to get them to participate.
holy cr@p, the only multi-player games we had back when I was in college were intermurals and D&D...
+10 Constitution.
Allied Assault was a favorite of our LAN parties as well. We pissed a lot of people off when we completely took over the 3rd floor study lounge. Although it was completely worth it, especially the time we brought in a projector and played Soul Caliber on the Dreamcast for two days straight.
I wonder how much this stuff had to do with me not getting laid much in college?
Love the Hrbek anecdotes. Totally deserving of an unprecedented Phase III of questioning.
Yes, but was Hrbek blogging in his basement? We need to know that sort of stuff.
Sadly, no. I think he was taking too much glee shooting Nazis to bother with blogging.