Hire Jim Essian

I had not been to a Cubs-Sox game since Cub Killer Jose Valentin hit a walkoff home run off even bigger Cub Killer Antonio Alfonseca TEN YEARS ago. Good lord, we're all old now. Almost a decade later, I found myself back in U.S. Cellular Field last night.

The Muskbox is back just in time for. Well, for whatever. To celebrate Anthony Rizzo's new (excellent) contract? Nah. To celebrate the return of the podcast? Nope. I'll just let Carrie explain what we're celebrating in this week's Muskbox.

We have approximately three listeners to our Hangout/podcast, and we invited one of them to join us about ten seconds before we went live. So, he doesn't have a microphone. Meaning there's some ambient noise. But deal with it, because the content is actually halfway decent this week. We give him college advice and talk about high school baseball. That's the level of baseball the Cubs are currently playing. Also, this opens the door wide open for guests. So, call me, Keeley Hazell.

Like the good old days, Dolan and I are flying duo in this week's Hangout. The look of joy on Dolan's face in the YouTube freeze frame is because he missed having me all to himself. We actually talk a lot of baseball for the first time in, like, ever. Mostly because there's baseball to be talked about. We also talk a lot about MLB '13: The Show and BioShock Infinite. Because both of those games are fucking awesome.

I made up some ludicrous statistics during yesterday's LiveBlog of the Cubs' 3-1 Opening Day victory. One ludicrous statistic that I did not make up is this one. In 2012, the Cubs were not only never in first place, but they were never over .500. In 2011, the Cubs were never in first place, and were not over .500 after April 20, 2011. In 2010, the Cubs were never in first place.

I guess I might as well liveblog/livetweet Opening Day for you saps still working for the man. I do your dirty work so you can do other people's dirty work. First pitch is in about 10 minutes. If the games were played on the PS3, that means we would be underway around 5:00 tonight. Follow the liveblog here or @hirejimessian.

Why is the Roundup so late? Because of a horrible, horrible thing that has come to pass. It's with a sadness in my heart that I report that Google is discontinuing Google Reader. Since HJE has existed, Reader has been the way I do the Roundup. For years, it was the easiest way to pull articles from all the terrible websites I read. Including this one. It was a quick (or exhausting) break from work. Now, I find myself forced to move over to Feedly. Which is...ehhhh. I'm sure Reader will pop up on Google+ anyhow. Which, by the way, is such a refreshingly clean social network. Probably because none of my friends ever post anything on it. Oh, well.

For absolutely no reason whatsoever, we decided to put our podcast team into a Google+ Hangout and record it. Now, we're posting it. We have faces for radio. The growing pains are painful. We talk about Al Yellon, Spring Training, and Luis Valbuena. With those topics HOW BAD CAN A PODCAST POSSIBLY GET? Stick around and find out! At least we kept it under an hour. But we'll get the hang of this podcasting thing at some point. Maybe someday we'll even have structure, segments, and things to say!

Carrie must be busily soaking up the Arizona sun. She only had time for one question in this week's Muskbox. I have two words of advice for Carrie. Wear high-SPF sunscreen, and don't ever go to Japan. There's only one topic tonight, and it's Kyuji Fujikawa. Actually, it's Chris Bosio's inability to speak Japanese. At least it's not about which kimono would best fit Bosio's corpulent form.

Not with an erection. OR WAS IT? The new podcast is up. It's as out there as all the other episodes. We're still talking about P90X because, fuck you, YOU didn't do it. Unless you're Pre, our only listener. We celebrate the trading of Tony Campana. We spend an unusually long time talking about the new Die Hard movie. I forget to mention the most annoying thing about Darksiders 2. The stupid game doesn't let you navigate the menus with the directional pad. Trust me. It's obnoxious. The controls. Not the podcast. That's always obnoxious.