A Super Bowl For The Dumpster

This has got to be the worst Super Bowl ever.
Last year we had a feel good story. A great team, with a great personality, and class, beat another team that was similar. You may not have wanted the Colts to win, but you couldn't really dislike them.
This year, well, we have everything that last year wasn't.
Let's start with the Giants. There is no reason anyone should ever root for any sports team from New York. A city that thinks its the only one in the world, most of whose teams have more money than anybody else (at least football has the salary cap) and an attitude suggesting it's their god-given right to win the title every year. New York is arrogant, and I hate arrogant. Top that off with Eli Manning. Sorry, but the elder brother got all the class in the family. Spoiled brat rotten kid refusing to play for the team with the right to draft him, oh yeah, Archie, you showed you were pretty classless as well. New York deserves Eli.
Now, moving on to New England. Last year Indy showed the world the classy side of excellence. This is the flip side. Arrogant, superior, sneering, cheating bullies. Belicheck breaks the rules and doesn't think he needs to answer to anyone about it. He runs the score up on teams without apology. His father was a coach, Navy I believe, and by all accounts an honorable man to whom sportsmanship meant something. How embarrassed for his son would he be. Again it's the arrogance thing. I hate that, and I despise Belicheck for the way he conducts himself. Tony Dungee and his starry-eyed, simplistic fundamentalism is infinitely superior to Bill's act.
So there's no one to root for in this year's contest. How do you sit and watch a game where the only good outcome can be a scoreless tie where everyone on both teams breaks a leg.
Enjoy the commercials.

Archbishop Hitler

Never thought I would spend half my time on this blog smoking out Nazis in modern society. I came across this story on the web and couldn't pass it up.


http://www.kmov.com/topstories/stories/kmov_localnews_080121_majerus.45f5820f.html


Nutshell: the new coach of the Saint Louis University (jesuit school) basketball team had the gall, the unmitigated audacity, to verbally support Hillary Clinton, Pro-Choice, and Stem Cell Research. Archbishop Burke of St. Louis, a prelate with a history of interfering with other people's lives, has decided that because of expressing those opinions he is unfit to coach at the University.
Once again we have the wonderful combination of cassocks and jackboots. Hey Burke! This is America! Just because your boss is a Nazi doesn't mean you have to try and one-up him! This absolutely fries me. He has no right to strongarm the University that way, nor to control the freedom of expression of its basketball coach. You don't have to surrender your conscience when you take a job and you don't have to wear a gag because a religious leader decides he doesn't like what you think. He wants to punish the coach for his remarks and probably will want to deny him the sacraments (he pulled that stunt a few years ago with John Kerry).
So far the University has remained sane and its position is that Majerus doesn't speak for the school on such matters. Lets all hope their saner heads prevail and Burke doesn't excommunicate him or some such.

Hmmm. Let's look at the Archbishop's actions with Kerry a moment. By his lights, if he denies the sacraments he puts the guy outside the pale, spiritually speaking. What happens if he just up and dies? In theological theory, if he dies whilst unshriven and with no last rites is his soul condemned? If so does that make the Archbishop guilty of something far worse than killing the meat body? Could he be arraigned for attempted soul-icide?

I can't believe Catholics aren't embarassed by this Nazi joker.

Blah-Blah-Blog

I spent a while surfing blogs this evening. It's damn hard to actually find one I want to read. When I read blogs I want compelling voices sharing their vision. I want drollery, profundity, wit, wisdom. I don't want product advertising, if I want porn all I have to do is stop avoiding it any time I'm online, and I don't read any language other than English (except a smattering of German). Right there I've removed about fifty percent of the candidates from consideration. Next, it sounds harsh, but I don't care about the daily minutiae and the diligently photographed cute moments of other people's families. Yeah, I know, they're not out there for me anyway but I still have to wade through them when I've gone walkabout in the blogosphere. Here's a revelation: pretending it's your infant children writing the blog is not nearly as cute as you think it is. Sorry. Neither is posting endless pictures of your cat's latest antics. Nor putting a soundtrack to your blog. Nor stamping/scrapbooking. There went another forty percent or so.
If you don't like those opinions or if you yourself are perpetrating a blog described above, oh well. You can just go straight to the 'next blog' button and never return. No skin off my nose.

Baseball-ocks

I came back to baseball at the end of college after a decade of not caring. I spent the nineties playing Rotisserie, knowing which team had the best fourth outfielder, the best set-up man. I remember Hank Aaron breaking the Babe's record, I remember Big Mac breaking Maris'. When it comes to baseball I am old-school, somewhere to the right of Bob Costas. I can't stand the DH or the wildcard, I look down on the American League as a whole, and I loathe the Yankees and the Red Sox almost equally.
I also really hate cheating.
Baseball is a different game. It's a team sport but one where the individual contributions stand out more than the team's efforts in many cases. The other major sports don't have this strange distortion. Collective accomplishments echo through history; the Whiz Kids, Murderer's Row, The Gashouse Gang, but no other sport worships its individual excellence the way baseball does. Year by year, career by career, baseball history is built of an ever-growing mountain of numbers put up by single players.
This is why football players can get caught using steroids, get suspended for four games or whatever, and it just blows over, but baseball players can't. Every point of batting average, every dinger, every K a pitcher throws matters because it gets built into the flying buttresses of the cathedral of baseball. It ornaments it as well as supporting it.
Here is what I think:
Barry Bonds is a cheating scumbag. Raphael Palmeiro is a cheating scumbag. Andy Petitte is a cheating scumbag, as is Jason Giambi. Rumors were floating around about Roger Clemens years before the Mitchell report came out. Is he a cheating scumbag? I'm fairly confident that he is, but that's opinion. I think Mark McGuire was a cheating scumbag. I think the record should be Maris'. I think the Mitchell report is the tip of the iceberg.
So what do we do about that?
I have been hearing lately that the prevalence of steroids in baseball means we should just throw up our hands, ignore it, and move on. Like it's not an uneven playing field, its just differently even. Don't asterisk any records, don't keep anybody out of the Hall of Fame, just wink and move on.
Bullshit.
One of the big arguments for this position is that how can you punish some and not others? Fine. Punish 'em all. No records count from the steroid era, nobody gets in the hall of fame (except maybe Tony Gwynn, don't try to tell me HE was on the juice...). Does this punish innocent players? Yeah, it does. So what? They were part of the culture, as far as I'm concerned they let it happen.
Too much of baseball is its history. Too much of its mystique is the trail of numbers disappearing into the past.
These cheaters have damaged baseball. I am drifting farther and farther away from a game that I used to really love.

Happy New (Election) Year

You know, for a while I thought it was just George Bush that I couldn't stand (and believe me I loathe that moronic self-righteous puppet). But it's not just him. Politicians seem to be assholes by design and party seems to make no difference. The only person fit to be president in this race from a human standpoint is Obama, and the flame of his integrity is already fluttering desperately in the gale of the machine of American politics. Hillary doesn't bear thinking about and neither do the scurrying sanctimonious hordes of GOP jackals.
I am pretty non-dogmatic in my political thoughts if you can call them that. The current regime makes me nauseous and that includes the executive and the recently shifted legislative divisions. Nancy Pelosi is a simp. Karl Rove is the anti-Christ. Until the Republicans overhaul their social platform I will never support them (fucking Nazis). The Democrats on the other hand make me tired. The Libertarians go too far. So what is an irritated cynic to do?
Some might argue with me about the various economic platforms but I won't argue back. There's a reason I'm reading "Economics For Dummies".
So what to take from all this? Democracy is stupid and corrupt. It's only saving grace is that all the other options are MORE stupid and MORE corrupt.

Sieg Heil, y'all!

In case you were not aware of it, there are Nazis in the country music industry. Strange place for them I know but there it is. This is something I got irritated by a while back but I am just now getting around to writing about. I have a lot of those lined up in the back of my head, so be prepared.
About the Nazis. Remember the Dixie Chicks? They had the nerve to criticize the second dumbest man in politics (GW thanks God for Dan Quayle every day...) publicly. "Well, Hell, Bubba, we cain't have that! (Sound of tobacco juice missing spittoon) That there's just plumb un-pay-tree-ottic!"



http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/03/14/dixie.chicks.reut/



So, summing up the above, the corn pone idiot industry pulled the DCs record because they spoke out about what they believe in. "Great Horny Toads BillyBob, we cain't let 'em git away with that! Criticizin' ol' Dubya, where they think they at, Russia?!"

Hello?? Any active neurons in there?? This is America! We have freedom of speech! The Constitution (long word boys, I know, read slow, OK?) guarantees freedom of expression. If it didn't, half the sub-moronic crap that passes for country music would be savagely repressed. The DChicks are smart, making them an oddity in their profession, and they pay attention when they are out and about in the world. We are not liked out there and the current regime is to blame for that situation. They are allowed to comment on that. Censoring them for it is the work of tyranny, something we as Americans should fight against, not support.

Nazis. In the country music radio industry. They are there, even if they think "Gestapo" is some kind of fancy Eye-talian soup. The Dixie Chicks are now my favorite country music artists.


It amazes me that the Dixie Chicks get slammed with that sort of crap while brainless no talent hicks like Toby Keith can, from what I have heard, use terms like "raghead" without catching any hell for it. Sorry, but if there is truth in that, then he's a racist, and that's wrong. It has nothing to do with patriotism or supporting our troops or anything like that. The entire Arabic population of the world did not attack us, a bunch of extremists did. We have extremists in this country too, but they don't represent all of us, and I can't stand them either.

So good on the Dixie Chicks, good on free speech, and fuck off to the country music industry. Hope the swastika looks good on your big-ass belt buckles.

A Rigged Game

Make no mistake about it, the game is rigged. Ladies, argue all you want, but you have got it set up so we can't win. Men get the shaft for not sharing their feelings, but when they manage it, they better not be the wrong ones. Because if they are, then we are mean heartless bastard lazy unappreciative wrong-headed badguy fill in the fucking blank.

I have a wife. I have an ex-wife. There is no doubt in the world that I traded up when I got this wife. No question. However, this still does not change the fact that the communication game between the genders is rigged. Case in point.
We were in bed one evening and got into an argument about something. Don't remember about what, it was most likely about something I did or didn't do, probably more or less a legit beef, nobody has to tell me I'm plenty flawed. I was, however, not entirely wrong. I believe ninety plus percent of issues between people have blame to lay on both sides; those who don't believe this aren't trying to solve problems they're trying to be right. So we're lying there, my wife castigating me for not talking to her, not telling her how I feel, and I have a logjam in my throat. Nothing will come out and it's because I just KNOW where it's going to go. It's going to go to the land of The Man Is Wrong again, and nothing I can say is really going to change it. But I'm trying, despite how hard this is I'm trying to share my feelings. The inherent futility is what is filling up my mind and this is what I manage to tell her. "I feel like I can't say anything," I say, "because I feel like whatever I say I'll be wrong." It may not be the issue for her but it is the issue for me, it is definitely what I am feeling. Does it open a dialogue? Does it create a space for us to share our divergent points of view. No. Of course not. After a long pause she flings the covers off and storms out of the room, leaving me lying alone to drift off to a troubled sleep feeling confused and angry.

Why the Hell would I want to share my feelings after an experience like this? Why would I not just tell her nothing is wrong when the wrong answer causes a worse reaction then no answer?