The Biggest Trade of All Time July 18, 2007
Posted by rosolio in Common Sense, Football.add a comment
There’s a reason so many people play fantasy football and Madden more than their equivalents in baseball, basketball, and hockey. A huge part is the draft, which is treated like a college graduation and taken about as seriously as a heart attack. Honestly, this is the adult equivalent of playing dress up, it really is. You’ve got the guy whose office you’re using, doing the “it’s my house, so I get the sweet chair” move, the acting commissioner of your league, who’s having a good time until someone a) takes too long to make a pick; or b) grabs the player he wanted just before him. Then he’s Pol Pot. Everyone’s wearing a player’s jersey that might as well be a big sign that says, “If you want to piss me off, pick this guy.” It’s a day that begins with so much promise and everyone pissed at each other at the end. Like in fantasy baseball (and other sports), you get to make the decision. This is the major reason people get into fantasy sports; they get to simulate running a team just like the pros.
But something makes football different…and it’s that Fantasy is not like the pros.
The General Managers in the NFL are the best in all of sports. No team, regardless of owner or fanbase or anything, has any financial advantage; even playing field means Dan Snyder can’t buy every free agent every year, although he tries. It’s not that hard being Brian Cashman or any big-market baseball GM. Just go get a player. That’s the first thing you do in a franchise for Madden: go get all the free agents who didn’t sign before the game came out. In the NFL, there also are almost never blockbuster trades. The NBA sees superstars changing uniforms all the time and often, one side gets, to use a technical term, fucked. You’ve got Kareen Abdul Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Robert Parrish and the pick that became Kevin McHale all changing hands for virtually nothing. Baseball’s Red Sox sold the Babe and the Edmonton Oilers gave Wayne Gretzky away to promote hockey in the sun belt. That hardly ever happens in the NFL, because these guys are too smart and too good at evaluating scenarios and players in the draft.
The biggest trade in history was just set in stone yesterday, a mere six years after the fact. The #1 choice in the 2001 draft for the #5 and two others.
Everyone thought San Diego was out of their goddamn mind, namely because they were 1-15 and the absolute doormat of the league. While Cleveland, Houston, and Oakland have all had abysmal years since then, none of them were as bad as San Diego was. Everyone and their mother bet against them, they were a sure thing every week. Even Dan Fouts was giving the points. If you liked money, you bet against San Diego in 2000. This team is so bad…and a player no one has ever seen before was sitting there…the amazing Michael Vick was a phone call away from being a Charger.
The trade itself was, frankly, even. LaDainian Tomlinson for Michael Vick (the other picks didn’t really pan out). Tomlinson is arguably the best player in the game and Vick single handedly made the Falcons competitive. I don’t really include Drew Brees in the trade, even though I could, since not taking Vick allowed the Chargers to take a cheaper quarterback later. Brees, for the record, is the fifth best quarterback in the game.
Fast forward to now, with Michael Vick getting indicted. Everyone ran over to the Chargers and declared a winner. But the issue goes way beyond that…not for the teams, but for Vick himself.
If the San Diego Chargers had drafted Michael Vick, he would not be getting indicted right now.
I’ve never been to Atlanta, but I have seen a map. It’s the only major metropolis for hundreds of miles, surrounded entirely by the deepest of the Deep South. You often hear people from rural areas say, “We had to make our own fun.” Usually, this means tire swings and throwin’ a makeshift boat in a crick. But if you’ve got a few million dollars, the options open up (it is important to know that Vick’s puppy fights started his rookie year, right after he got the first big paycheck). Make no mistake, Michael Vick is straight country having grown up in Virginia, and Atlanta isn’t some Southern Jonestown where Yankees walk in Wall Street suits and out the other side with tattered suspenders and nothing else on. Vick could have gone a lot of places and still be down with the whole dogfighting thing.
But not San Diego.
The city also known as The Whale’s Vagina is an absolute paradise. Ridiculous beaches with ridiculous surfing and the hottest surfer chicks you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s like Miami, but cleaner. It’s like LA, but about 20 degrees cooler in August. It’s like Gary, Indiana, but not hell on Earth. Everyone I know there says they will never leave, not even for vacation. Michael Vick would have been the king of San Diego and all of Southern California. He’d have a huge beachfront house and roll up to Los Angeles for the club scene and have hundreds of millions of ways to spend his hundreds of millions of dollars.
Plus, if he ever wanted to gamble, Vegas is right there. If he ever had a bloodlust, he could always drive down to Tijuana and bet on cockfights. It’s in Mexico, so no one would have cared or known about it. They’re chickens, and don’t tell PETA, but people don’t give a shit about animals they eat. Plus, he could nail a couple transsexual hookers and do lines of crushed-up over the counter Vicodin while he was watching (that’s Baja multitasking).
They say the draft is the most important day of a player’s life, and this has never been more true than it is for Michael Vick. Bet the Falcons wish they still had Matt Schaub…speaking of which:
If you like money, bet against Atlanta in 2007.
751’s Red Flag July 6, 2007
Posted by rosolio in Baseball, Common Sense.add a comment
With the All-Star game coming up next week in San Francisco, every ounce of the media’s attention is focused on the biggest attraction that ballpark has to offer: larger than life world-class asshole Barry Bonds, who stands within five swings of the bat from eclipsing the most legendary record in American sports. Oh yeah, there’s a really good chance he cheated to do it.
While Bonds is the poster child for the dark age known as the Steroid Era in Major League Baseball, it’s important to remember that he’s never actually been convicted of anything. Jason Grimsley, Jason Giambi, Rafael Palmeiro and Mark McGwire have all been caught or have given explanations so weak they might as well have been written with a syringe. Every power hitter during this troubling time is under suspicion forever, but the pitchers get off scott free.
Roger Clemens was done in 1996. The Red Sox aren’t idiots, and they didn’t think he had anything left. Then all of a sudden, he gets on the bad side of 35 and becomes the most dominant pitcher of his era, winning his 350th game this week. No one blinks. What sort of hypocrisy is this, especially since Clemens has the one trait shared by Bonds and the aforementioned cheaters:
He has a huge fucking head.
Look at him in his pics from Texas and his early days at Fenway. He was totally ridiculous on the mound, but he also looked like a regular guy. Suddenly, he’s in pinstripes in the Bronx and…well let’s put it this way: Steven Segal could fit his entire head inside Clemens’ head. He could probably get all the way inside and practice Tai Chi, and it would be spacious.
Case in point, I sat on the first base side when Brady Anderson put on 50 pounds of muscle in two months. Huge head. But we were drinking the Golden Age of Baseball Kool-Aid back then, and we continued to buy in until the Jonestown that was the senate hearings. That’s what steroids do; as huge as you get, your head grows more than anything. Kirstie Alley gained 30 stone 7 over the course of an afternoon, but her head looks the same (she also has a pedestrian 40 time). The only thing that adds significantly to your head comes from Balco.
So when in doubt, the gigantic head is the red flag. That’s why when we look back at the late nineties, we need to remember the great players, not just the HGH monsters that are the current standard bearers. Greg Maddux? Genius pitcher; tiny head. Ken Griffey, Jr? Amazing swing; same hat he wore in 1992. Curt Schilling? Compare his rookie year in Baltimore with the bloody sock game, paying close attention to the gravitational pull of that sandbag on top of his shoulders…that’s all I’m saying…
Common Sense Man: Cardinals, Trust Falls, and Ludicrous Lawsuits May 24, 2007
Posted by rosolio in Baseball, Common Sense.1 comment so far
I think I’m pretty good about being an American. It’s not hard to get a C+ in that at all. You just need to pay your taxes, stand for the National Anthem, and not board-check Margie, the little old lady with cataracts the size of DirecTV dishes, when she tries to merge into your lane on Lakeshore drive. We might want to. After all, the daffy woman’s left turn signal has been on since the Carter administration. But we don’t. We show restraint. And a lot of that comes from the psychotically basic of civilized duties: trust.
Considering how many people I know that can’t drive a golf cart in a straight line and have been busted for DUI, it’s an absolute miracle that the driving system works. You stay in your lane, we’ll stay in hours. We’ll observe speed limits (at least the signs, while we gun past them). It’s really amazing. Wow, we really trust the shit out of each other, don’t we? In today’s Patriot Act and identity theft America, how do we trust each other? Because we trust ourselves to do our part. I’m trusting Margie not to t-bone me because she’s trusting me to do the same.
But, if there’s a car crash, it has to be someone’s fault.
Accidents happen all of the time, way less than they probably should. The more stuff auto manufacturers cram into cars to distract us, the more likely we are to be…distracted. I’ve fished for a CD in the foot-area of the passenger seat while on the highway. If little ol’ Margie didn’t see me in her larger than average blind spot, I would have been dust. Accidents are accidents, sometimes bad things just happen. If you’re boozing, bad things are slightly more likely to happen.
The reason I’m talking about this is that I just read that the father of Josh Hancock, the St. Louis Cardinals pitcher who died in a fatal car crash, is suing the bar his son was visiting for over-serving him. Over-serving. Josh wanted booze and the bar served him. And they’re getting sued. For not protecting young Josh against himself and his own horrible judgement. Let’s break this down.
I know people who it is goddamn impossible to tell if they’re wasted. I know some people who become more eloquent after a six or seven beer buzz. The fact that it is ever, EVER on the bartender for serving someone who made the horrible decision to get behind the wheel of a car while blacked out is totally insane. Also, a little indisputable fact, no one who gets in an alcohol related accident or popped for a DUI does so on their first go round. This was probably closer to the 30th time for the late Josh Hancock.
What in the holy hell is wrong with us? People are suing McDonald’s for making them fat; it’s the worst food on the planet. Yes, the millet the peasant workers were eating in Seven Samurai is of a higher nutritional quality. People suing cigarette companies for making products that kill them. The guy who sued the lawnmower company after picking it up and using it on a vertical hedge. The commercials that show an H2 diving under the sea and turning into a Bond car have a tiny disclaimer that reads “Simulation, do not attempt.” What happened to trusting people not to be idiots? How can we plan to protect people who have no common sense? Wouldn’t Darwinism have kicked in back when this kid was eating paste in the 1st grade? What’s so wrong with that? It drives me out of my goddamn mind that we need to modify our rules to cater to people who can’t be Trusted to look out for themselves and each other. God forbid someone feel bad about being called stupid, even if they’re destined to pull a Death Proof on an unsuspecting family of four who Trusted them to not do exactly that.
Hancock’s father is upset and is looking for someone to blame other than his son who made a bad decision and died for it. He violated the trust of everyone else on the road by not being in full capacity to drive. There’s that T word again, a cornerstone of being an American citizen. Another one is responsibility, and in this case, it all lies with Josh Hancock.
The Chicken or the TrimSpa February 9, 2007
Posted by rosolio in Common Sense, TV.add a comment
I know I’ve tread upon this turf before, and if I repeat myself too many times, I stand dangerously close to becoming a preening blowhard with a portable soapbox. But I think I might have a different spin on the topic of hype today and I certainly have a reason to bring it to everyone’s attention.
Anna Nicole Smith is dead…and this is a national tragedy?
Forget about the sanctity of life and the refusal to trash someone’s memory the second they expire for a second; that impulse can be remarkably strong, especially if the life in question is a well-documented one. Anna Nicole Smith was a perfect storm of doom; a piece of white-bread trailer trash who was just good looking enough that a bit of surgery could garner her a career. She is the ultimate gold-digger, marrying a guy who looked like Dana Carvey’s turtle man (that’s right, I paid to see Master of Disguise…Go Dana!) just before he was about to start rolling the credits. This led to a tooth and nail legal battle between her and the old guy’s former heirs (aka: kids) over the vast assets he left behind. Then you have the pill-popping trainwreck of an addict who documented her own self-destructive spiral on the E! channel. Finally, you have a Skinny Again diet pill shill, whose dramatic loss in weight made people feel good about her, even though she was still cracked out on numerous prescription pain killers.
Addiction is a disease, and addicts are not criminals on their own. Putting these people in prison is not targeting their problems at all. But all pity is thrown out the window when an addict chooses to not only ignore their problem, but flaunt it and profit from it; The Anna Nicole Show might as well of been called, “Watch Anna Get Loaded And Do Crazy Things.” Anna Nicole Smith’s son, who famously overdosed about six months ago, died because of his mother’s lack of concern about the nature of addiction. She made no effort to treat her own problem and was undoubtedly a horrible mother if for no other reason than that. There was a second kid, a younger one, in the picture. How can being raised by Anna Nicole Smith be an even slightly good thing. I’ll quote the great Ace Carolla and say that the kid would have a better chance at success if they just pulled it back in one of those water balloon wingers and fired it towards the nearest neighboring family. Yeah, Barry Bonds breaking the home run record would send a bad message to kids. You don’t care about kids, if you did, you’d be glad this crackwhore’s kid was finally free.
So this virulent former model is dead. Why do we care? Why is CNN running nine different stories on her? Why are news outlets trying to call this a national tragedy? If you just walked out of a fallout shelter and had no idea what was going on, you’d think Anna Nicole Smith was the first lady, or at the very least Grace Kelly. Why in the hell is no one bringing up her addiction?!? WHY ARE PEOPLE USING THE WORDS ‘MURDER’ AND ‘NATURAL CAUSES?!?
Because that’s what people want to see.
It’s the ultimate chicken or the egg conversation of our time. A large portion of entertainment today is a traveling freakshow. That’s all reality television and contests are. People tune in to watch American Idol hopefuls make asses of themselves. Many of them have mild-to-severe autism, but if we ignore that, they’re just idiots who chose to chase an impossible dream (I’m so tired of that by the way; this is exactly like watching kids with down syndrome run at each other at high speeds and collide. If you think that’s offensive or immoral and enjoy the American Idol auditions, you’re a hypocrite and lying to yourself). They want fighting on Laguna Beach and Survivor, because people love watching conflict. They want villains like Omarosa. They want to pretend that Paula Abdul is just really tired all the time. They make Paris Hilton famous for being famous and turn a blind eye to her use of racial slurs when Senators have to resign for using the words that sound like racial slurs (niggardly). They chase Tom Cruise around; granted, he’s a crazy person, but no one would know it if the population of this country wasn’t so hell-bent on finding something wrong with people. How do we know Cary Grant didn’t believe that he was the reincarnation of Zeus or that Babe Ruth didn’t think he could shit civilizations? How do we know Audrey Hepburn didn’t go directly from the set of Breakfast At Tiffany’s to a hotel room full of coke for a Blow and Bukkake Potluck? We didn’t know because we didn’t ask…because it wasn’t any of our fuckin business.
Unflattering pictures of celebrities get sold for millions of dollars, as do autopsy photos and rich people’s herpes medication. I’m so sick and tired of people suckling at the hamster feeder that is trying to pass this off as significant. We have 24 hour news markets and a lot that is more important than Lindsay Lohan’s weight.
The news channels will not stop covering it because they need us to make it significant. I just wish it was that easy to turn it off, considering I have to go to these sources to find out actual news. Buried somewhere in stories about Angelina Jolie being anorexic, another rich heiress’s sex tape getting leaked, and a video of a fat dog on a skateboard (…seriously), I found the story on Barack Obama formally announcing his candidancy for President.
Thank god I can’t see the hit count rankings for those stories or I’d probably kill myself.
Common Sense Man: Viewer Discretion Advised January 19, 2007
Posted by rosolio in Common Sense, Immigration, Racism, TV.add a comment
Viewer Discretion Advised
Haven’t gotten anything out there in a while, but then again nothing has gotten me wound up enough to rant about. I have no idea if that sentence is grammatically correct, but I’m not going back to edit it. I don’t want to. There it is.
Muslim groups and Islamic-American watchdog organizations are all bent out of shape about this season of 24, saying they are concerned that it is painting a bad picture of arabs. In an actual quote, a spokesman said: “After watching that show, I was afraid to go to the grocery store because I wasn’t sure the person next to me would be able to differentiate between fiction and reality.” This person is a preening blowhard. Can’t differentiate between TV and reality? Angry that it’s painting a bad picture? The people who are going to be influenced by things they see on TV aren’t going to be by a fictional show that says Viewer Discretion Advised at the beginning. If anything, I don’t know, they might be influenced by the sectarian violence and anti-americanism going on in the middle east. While I’m not in favor of singling out ethnic groups and making sweeping judgements, it is a statement of fact that every IED in Iraq was designed and placed by a muslim gentleman with the intentions of killing an american soldier. So if I’m going to be a small minded thug and say that all muslims are out to kill me, I’m going to get my information from the news…reality…, not 24. It is equally small minded and stupid to be unable to differentiate between the lunatics (yes, lunatics) in the middle east who danced in the streets on 9/11 and the american citizens who happen to be from one of these countries. While it is a statement of fact that sleeper cells may exist, 99.99999999% of the muslims in this country are good people. It’s like any other religion, you’ve got your fundamentalist, every-word-literally nutjobs everywhere. 24 is not saying that all muslims are terrorists, but all jihadists are arabs. Just like every militant doctor-shooting pro-lifer is a Christian.
This wouldn’t make me so mad if 24 wasn’t GOING OUT OF THEIR WAY TO PROVE THE POINT THAT ARABS ARE GETTING A BAD RAP FOR THIS! For Christssake, you letter-writing xenophobes, there’s a whole storyline following the mistreatment of a member of an Islamic-American Anti-Defimation group! It’s making your goddamn point for you! They’re just angry that a show is doing more to dictate what jingoism can actually do than these watchdog group’s pamphlets. Watch the show before you whip out your pen and get all pissed. Plus, if you recall, the last time there was a muslim-related terrorist attack (season 2), there was an evil white capitalist who was really to blame in the background!
24’s not racist; these letter-writers are. Morons. Same idiots who wrote angry letters about Borat being anti-semetic. Nothing to do with religion, race or whatever. Everything to do with assholes who want to get their picture in front of the camera. Imbeciles who shout at the top of their lungs about “Not wanting our children to see a difference between people” while at the same time demanding kids become indoctrinated in traditions that make them “proud to be different.” Don’t look at us differently, but we’re going to be different. Cake and eating it. Don’t hold a PTA meeting because a kindergartener asks a jewish classmate why he’s wearing a yarmulke. EXPLAIN IT, DON’T PANIC!
Don’t get upset about things you don’t understand, don’t assume that fiction (which happens to mirror reality) is going to paint a bad picture of you, and don’t keep shoveling coal into this engine of racism. That’s all these watchdog groups do; make people sit down and study the cosmetic differences between people. Oh no, we didn’t have an Asian person in our miller lite commercial. Are we saying that Asian people don’t like miller lite? Quick, photoshop one in there. Bam, a person becomes a ‘one’.
These are the same idiots who go to Kenya and go “Wow, look at all the minorities.” It’s the same people who don’t want anyone to say Christmas tree, but instead Holiday tree. The tree is linked to Christmas! It’s a Christian holiday! I’m not a Christian, but I call it a goddamn Christmas tree because that’s what it is! What, are you fooling people when you say Holiday tree? Is there someone out there who’s going, “So, when the oil for the lanterns in the desert lasted an unexpected 8 days and 8 nights, there was a temperate PINE TREE IN THE CORNER OF THE ROOM?!?” The people who are so terrified of saying something offensive or racist are incredibly racist and offensive because they’re recognizing lines that can’t cross, which does little more than highlight the lines themselves. Stop seeing the lines and all of this goes away.
I HATE stupid people. Or maybe I just think I do because of the ones I’ve seen on TV.
Kramer vs. Kramer December 1, 2006
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A topic that has been very much on my mind was recently tackled by the great Aceman as part of his full salvo of common sense attack on the psychotic, money grubbing lich that is Gloria Allred. The trial system in this country is obsolete. It was designed to create as fair and unbiased a trial as possible by selecting jurors who didn’t know the plaintiff, the defendant, or anything about the trial. The thing is, the only people they would select were rich, white, landowning men, who were also the only educated people back then. This isn’t to say that we go back to a racist/sexist/moneyist (what the hell?) juror selection system. But the problem is that with information being so readily available (I can watch TV on my cellphone using a brilliant device called a Slingbox), the only people left who don’t know about these high profile cases are going to be uneducated shut-ins; that’s just a fact. In my hour and a half stint on ESPN1300 last week, I received a dozen questions about my opinion regarding the Michael Richards situation (since, as a standup, I get to deal with hecklers and hecklerquette all the time). This was a sports show for christssake, and they were talking about this case (I use that term, because Allred is trying to make it into one). So if this thing does go to trial, who the hell would they find for the jury? Who doesn’t know about it? Uneducated people who can be easily manipulated by Allred and her ravings. All she has to do is drop the racism card and everyone on the jury will be terrified of letting a “convicted racist” get off “scott free” (I put that in quotes, because Richards’ isn’t exactly getting out of this with his career or life in tact).
I agree wholeheartedly with the Aceman on this one: hurt feelings should never incur financial damages because there’s no hospital bill or wages lost. The “victims” in the comedy club did not feel threatened by a skinny senior citizen onstage with a microphone. And if this thing does go to trial, Michael Richards will pay Gloria Allred, a rich, white, landowning vulture of a woman, a couple million dollars. Is that how our system is really supposed to work? If Michael Richards wasn’t Kramer but instead worked at a Jiffy Lube, would Allred be demanding justice in the form of a wire transfer?
How do you fix it? Two choices: either a lie detector, the technology of which has become so advanced that it’s 99.99999999999999% accurate (which is more than you can say for jurors [re: human error] or birth control medication), or a bench trial. The former was the Aceman’s solution, and I see no problem with mine: a single, impartial, heavily educated and heavily experienced arbitrator who employs common sense and analysis to find the truth. No more games, no more manipulation, no more ignorance, no more Gloria goddamn Allred. Here’s hoping a house falls on her.
It Puts the Lotion in the Basket October 4, 2006
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It’s been a long time – a good sixty years or so – since we’ve really encountered a crazy person with his finger on the button. In defense of foreign policies, the governments of both the United States and Soviet Union have tossed the ‘madman’ label out there. Saddam Hussein was given that label quite recently, but there’s a difference between ‘evil’ and ‘crazy.’ Sure, Hussein gassed boatloads of Kurds, but he wasn’t doing so indiscriminately. If he was really as out of his mind as we’d like to believe, he would have brought the genocide out into the streets and made no effort whatsoever to hide it. And as off-his-ass nuts as Hitler was, he had a cadre of handlers (re: sane people) who kept all of his crimes against humanity on the downlow. This stems from Bond movies: every bad guy who sits across the justice scale from 007 is both evil and out of his mind. We fused them together in the 1960s and like chocolate covered pretzels, we prefer to have them together. It’s much less disconcerting when the bad guy is maniacal. We can separate ourselves from them by turning them into a sub-human beast. It’s the ones who are calm and composed and so very…human…that we have trouble with. The Silence of the Lambs is a great example. We like our adversaries to be closer to Buffalo Bill than Hannibal Lecter; we’d prefer to see Hussein stumbling around in front of a camera with a wig on sporting the Full Tuck. The problem is that years of assigning Crazy to Merely Bad people has left us totally unprepared for Real Deal Crazy.
Kim Jong Il is textbook crazy. We were concerned that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, but KJI flaunts his efforts to get them. We’re nervous about nomadic Al-Qaeda wannabes sneaking a dirty bomb into a subway car, and KJI announces his plans to test a nuclear weapon that could have horrible environmental effects on the East Asian Region. We’re so nervous about our image in the world that we don’t have the stones any longer to handle this the way we need to. If North Korea, a nation duped into believing that their humunculous bespectacled leader created the goddamn world, obtains nuclear capabilities, there is no reason NOT to believe that they won’t take a potshot at Juneau or San Francisco or Los Angeles. They have nothing to lose, with the fuckin messiah in their corner. I’m not necessarily saying we should flatten North Korea now, but there’s going to be a time in the not too distant future where the people we trust with our national decisions are going to have a doozy on their dockets. Humanitarianism aside, this could very possibly reach Us or Them territory. We’ll see how we react when we get there. Until then, we can continue to make fun of the tiny Dr. No of the 47th parallel and hope to high hell he can’t get the recipe right.
Borat, John McClane, and France July 1, 2006
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Okay…watching the World Cup again…somewhat immobilized. We’ve got Brazil and we’ve got France. In classic Sherlock Holmes fashion, I may have just discovered why these teams are so good and the American team just plain wasn’t: they’ve got players. The best athletes in each respective nation are playing in this game. Such is the case with all of the top flight teams in glaring contrast to the United States. American-born athletes rarely turn to soccer, and when your supposed star is under 5’8”, it’s just not going to work.
We do have a couple very good players, most notibly The Gooch, who patrols the backline like a more nimble Ben Wallace. But there’s no way we can roll with these upper echelon athletes. Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney are built like tanks and have sub 4.4 speed. Ronaldinho has that Michael Vick “Holy Shit!” speed factor. Thierry Henry is basically Dwyane Wade. Imagine how much different our chances in the World Cup would be if our team had Allen Iverson, Vick, T.O., LeBron, Dwight Freeney… I mean, wow. Granted, if T.O. was involved in any sort of international competition, it’s safe to say that it would not help our overseas reputation and that a full scale war could break out as a result.
I’m also convinced that the reason the Americans will never be significantly competitive in soccer is the way we view flopping. The French, Portuguese, and Italians (who are all still in, by the way) consider falling down and pretending to be injured as being part of the game. While there is flopping in the NBA (and it is honed to perfection at Duke University), you never see anyone fake an injury, because it makes you look gutless. So our frontier spirit and our belief in it keeps us from cheating. So we can’t win. There are worse things to be than honorable.
Score Henry, France up 1-0. No way in hell anyone on the U.S. is athletic enough to do something like that.
Usually the more times you make a trip, the shorter it seems, because there isn’t that unexpectedness. The exact opposite is true for getting to Midway airport. It seems like 10 minutes are added every time I pick up the Orange line. It even seems far away by cab. This irks me.
Has anyone actually changed their Brita filter? And if so, was there a noticeable improvement? I just learned how to defrost a steak, so take it easy on me.
Isn’t pornography basically prostitution on camera? And if so, why wouldn’t tricks and ho’s just whip out a camera and save themselves the jail time?
Which of the following will not live up to the hype? Snakes on a Plane or Borat? I’m going to say Snakes on a Plane, just because seeing it will leave nothing to the imagination, which is the best part of this movie.
The Cubs fan is by far the most dejected and easily destroyed fan in all of organized sport. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even pre-2004 Red Sox fans kept some semblance of faith beyond June.
Speaking of which, how shitty was my June? Remarkably shitty.
Are they really playing Jump in the background of Fox Major League Baseball? They couldn’t find anything even slightly newer?
The price of having a good World Cup team: total devastation when you get knocked out. The English fans look like they might all jump off the Old Bailey.
Was V for Vendetta a good movie? I still don’t know.
Zidane just got mugged by a Brazilian player, who ran away afterwards. The ref couldn’t find him so there were no cards. He basically punched the bully and then hid behind the monkey bars. Would Randy Moss do that? We’re never winning the World Cup.
Best part about watching soccer? No commercials.
Here’s an analogy: Imagine if the democrats and republicans played a softball game once every four years. The grudges would be amazing. That’s what the World Cup is like for these countries.
So it’s France vs. Portugal, Italy vs. Germany.
Who started the bag on the head thing? Like the one’s that say “Fire Dusty [Baker]”? Doesn’t it seem a little archaic, almost like throwing rotten vegetables?
Does Taco Bell honestly believe the “good to go” hand gesture is going to catch on? I think they do…
Another interesting twist: Christian Ronaldo scored the final penalty kick that knocked out England, and his club team is Manchester United. How are the Man-U fans feeling about that? He might never be able to go back to that team.
They picked the most effeminate member of the Chicago Fire to give an inspiring speech in their commercial. Doesn’t quite have the Maximus effect.
Die Hard came out almost twenty years ago. John McClane can vote. More importantly, people born the year Die Hard came out can vote. And people born in the 90s can drive. Damn it.
Off-Tube Commentary and the Pursuit of Happiness June 22, 2006
Posted by rosolio in Common Sense, TV, World.add a comment
Reasonably intelligent people all share the common trait of being in control of what they care about. Or at least can stay aware of it. Usually. Case in point, I was anti-Bloody Mary for my entire career, until tasting what was apparently a mediocre one at Corcorans led me to a totally new conclusion. I didn’t wake up a week and a half later and realize, “Holy crap, I like Bloody Marys now.” Same with entertainment. I knew right away that NBC’s summer test run show ‘Teachers’ was painstakingly awful. I didn’t try to rationalize anything (“Susan from Coupling is on it, and she was…uh…funny on that show…”), I just knew it. I knew I didn’t like the I.O. manual ‘Truth in Comedy’ around page 15 and I was fired up to buy the Oceans Eleven DVD a halfhour after stepping into the theater. You know right away.
There are only two scenarios that defy this trope (keep in mind this is for reasonably intelligent people. It wouldn’t surprise me if this list continued endlessly for people camping out for Larry The Cable Guy tickets. Ohhhhhhh!): 1) when you’re in love, and; 2) when you deeply care about a sport or sports team. Some people never experience one or both of these things, but hey I’m trying to make a point here. The former is obvious, and fairly universal. The whole ‘love at first sight’ thing isn’t reality. What happens is you wake up one day thinking about someone, realize you’ve done that a few times in the last few days, and before you know it, you come to the conclusion that you’re in actual, real-deal love and didn’t know it. Often, this realization can put you in a terrible spot, but that’s not the focus of this column, no no. We’re talking about the latter today, which was spent listening to the Off-Tube Commentary of the World Cup match between Ghana and the United States.
The Off-Tube Commentary to which I refer is one of the most simultaneously brilliant and ridiculous ideas in recent history. The World Cup is totally blacked out on the internet, at least in English, because audio and video rights were purchased by ESPN and BBC Sports. The BBC adheres so strictly to the rules that they will broadcast literally everything except the game itself. So you have all the pregame and predictions and analysis, and then the online radio player shuts off like the electricity at 1157 W. Diversey, Chicago IL, 60614 (see the previous article on this subject). So this tiny English newspaper (which I suspect is the New York Post of the UK, based on the number of headlines involving booze-induced embarrassments and injuries to celebrities) has a link to two guys sitting around watching the game on TV and giving the play-by-play themselves. No official color commentary, no sponsors, just two random fans telling you what’s happening on their TV. This idea is so good, that I’ll probably be trying it at some point during the NFL season. What if they did this for dramatic television as well? “And Michael is down in the hatch, yes, he just told Ana Lucia that he’ll kill Henry…yep, she gave him the gun…oh my! oh dear oh dear oh dear…”
(note: The potential for drinking games surrounding this is totally endless as well. My personal favorite is taking a shot every time one of the announcers describes a player as being “knackered”. Play with the word “quality” and you’ll be shitfaced before halftime).
So I’m listening to it, experiencing the typical ups and downs of a sporting event while still maintaining relative diligence at work. When the dust settled, and jesus, did it settle, Ghana defeated the U.S. 2-1, scoring the second goal off of a penalty shot drawn by the flopping Pimpong (great name). In fact, there was a lot of flopping, so much that the neutral British commentators were making fun of the situation. “And Pimpong goes down like he’s been shot in the leg. There wasn’t any contact. The Germans are awfully strict aren’t they?” The Ghanians basically made Shane Battier and Vlade Divac look like Abe Lincoln (who couldn’t tell a lie) and Dennis Haysbert (who could run for president right now as David Palmer and would win in a total landslide). Whatever, either way, the Americans lost and Ghana sealed the victory by acting as if there was a U.S. sniper on the roof picking them down one by one.
As the clock reached zero, I found myself overcome with simultaneous sadness and rage. I immediately went onto Wikipedia to find out the gross national product of Ghana, hoping to be able to make some comparison to their gutless play on the soccer pitch with their inability to compete in the world economy. I cursed Landon Donovan’s total disappearing act. I started with countless ‘what ifs?’ regarding Eddie Pope and Pablo Mastoreni’s card suspensions and Claudio Reyna’s injury. As I did this, I came to a strange conclusion: I really cared about soccer. I know these guys’ names. I really cared about this U.S. team. I overtly wanted to follow the event as much as possible, but my rooting for the Americans was more of an obligation than a decision. Somewhere along the way, I started to give a shit. It didn’t happen then, but I noticed it then.
This lightning bolt of an epiphany caused me to start thinking about the other times I felt this way. The only teams that I really, really bleed for are the Ravens and Maryland basketball, with the Orioles simply falling a little behind due to the miserable ownership of Peter Angelos, but then again I should include them.
The Orioles had won the first game I ever went to. They beat the Yankees 10-1, Randy Milligan hit two home runs, and I was mesmerized by the fact that at any moment, I could stick a finger in the air and get a hotdog. I wasn’t a fan just yet, though. I wasn’t a fan until my favorite player, the closer Gregg Olson, blew a save against Boston, and I was left crying on the floor, like I played for Ghana and was within 30 feet of an American player in motion. It was the first game I could remember them losing, and I felt like I lost. ‘Them’ became ‘us’, and I did nothing but care.
For the Ravens, it was an end of the season game against the Patriots in 1999, the first season we didn’t totally stink on ice. We were on the brink of making the playoffs, which is sort of like a validating moment for a team that was new to a city so starved for football that we watched minor leaguers running around on a 110 yard field with only three downs for four years. Doug Flutie converted a 4th and a million by scrambling, barely making it, barely sealing our fate. They ended up getting another cheap score and we were done. We had lost…hang on a sec…38 games, but that was the first one I was pissed about. It was the pain then that was counteracted by total psychotic jubilation the next season, when we game back to beat Jacksonville at home. There’s no way it would have felt that good if Flutie’s scramble didn’t hurt so bad.
The Maryland one is easy: Final Four against Duke. Even the total collapse against the Dukies at home earlier that season didn’t hurt as bad as this one. For one thing, I was sick at home and not there (I probably would have gotten sick if I was there). Maybe that 54 second meltdown contributed to this pain, but we had them on the ropes, and it was for a chance to play for a title. We were up 22 at one point, and it was the fucking Dukies. The moment of clarity for me was when Chris Duhon and Steve Blake dove after a loose ball and Duhon slammed his head against the ground harder than any crash test dummy has hit anything…ever. He was jacked up, not like paralysis jacked up, but totally dazed and rolling around like he was about to stand up claiming to be Joan of Arc. As this guy writhed in pain, I remember thinking: “Good.” My investment in this outcome and my total hatred for everything the Dukies stood for completely overrode any sense of humanity that I had. I honestly didn’t care that this guy whacked the hell out of his head. Nothing else mattered except for my beloved Terps (who went on to dominate the Dukies the next year and win a national title…had to get that in there) and the wave of disappointment that enveloped Cole Field House.
The moral of the story? You’re not a fan until you get totally wrecked over a team. A lot of people never experience that; the people who don’t like sports certainly haven’t, and think people who hyperventilate after games (the victorious Tim Rosolio after a Mo Vaughn walk-off in 1996) are out of their minds. You get the same impression of people who are in love. Often their decisions are totally ridiculous, their devastation totally beyond everyone’s comprehension. Am I saying that you need to get completely buried by someone before you can understand what love is? I don’t think I am. I think the better way of looking at it is that you can’t really appreciate the good without getting a brutal, lingering taste of the bad.
Without that hope, none of it would be worth it.
Common Sense Man: Global Warming, Great Apes, and other Bedtime Stories May 1, 2006
Posted by rosolio in Common Sense, Media, Politics, World.add a comment
Rush Limbaugh does not believe in global warming. While the term ‘believe’ may seem out of place there, it’s because it is his own. He and many of his acolytes are under the distinct impression that global warming is a mythic abstraction that is accepted or rejected by the respective sides, despite boatloads of physical evidence. I for one would like to counter by saying that I do not believe in orangutans. I have never seen one, and am guessing that the ones featured on TV and in print are simply baboons wearing costumes.
Is he insane? Clearly not; he’s made multiple millions countering intelligent discourse with shouting and throat-wobbling (I’m not sure exactly how else to describe it, but if you hear the man talk, it sounds very much like he has a neck 94 inches in circumference; the acoustics in this man are similar to that of a gigantic festival tent that has collapsed on the band who, because they don’t get paid if they don’t play, power through the distraction). There is no such thing as an idiot-millionaire, but there is certainly such thing as a millionaire who plays an idiot on TV (or the radio). On the list of truly vile and dangerous people, he cannot possibly overtake Ann Coulter, for the sole reason that he is often seen as a sideshow, and not as a real person. However, he does preach a doctrine of seperatism and hate, so it’s always nice to watch him roll down a few notches.
The Jabba the Hutt of the AM dial is in the news for pleading guilty to prescription drug fraud. He went to three different doctors to load up on three supersized orders of OxyContin. It’s looking like he’s getting away with five years probation, but he’s already cracked once (the first warning was in 2003), so it’s likely it’ll happen again. Even if he doesn’t see the inside of a jail cell, at least we’ll get a chance to see if Limbaugh believes in constipation, nausea, somnolence, dizziness, vomiting, pruritus, headache, dry mouth, sweating, and asthenia. Then again, side effects could be part of the Jewish-Liberal media agenda as well…
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In more pressing, less morbidly obese news, the Sudanese Government is drafting a proposal to end the violence in Darfur. While this is the most optimism yet to appear from the situation, things are not looking tremendously positive. That is, it is very unlikely that the rebel groups and/or the Janjaweed are going to accept any kind of deal.
With all of the attention on Iraq and terrorism, immigration and race relations, the situation in Darfur is and has been the worst conflict in the world for the last three years. Obviously, we can’t all pull a Lord Byron and join the war, and, frankly, it is not in the interests of any world power to intervene. The best we can do is pay attention. Eventually, we may have some kind of a voice in determining the future of Darfur, and when that time comes, it’s a plus to know about it so it doesn’t get swept under the rug.
