. . .

• Oh, man, I'm seriously procrastinating bad. I have a very large report for my cataloging class that is due in about ten days that I haven't started.
• So, apparently the comments were set to moderate on this blog. I just found that feature tonight and approved them. I switched that off, but I left word verification on. Anyway, there was a comment here that needed a reply.
• People here are going fucking apeshit over the football. You have to be down here day to day to understand the effect the Cowboys' play has on the area -- if they win, they're going to the Super Bowl and everyone's happy, if they lose, Parcells is the worst coach of all time, all the players are shit, they should dump the rest of the season, and everyone is ready to commit mass suicide on Dealey Plaza. It's insane. Also, there were 46,000+ at Texas Stadium this weekend for a *high school* football game.
• Speaking of football, Notre Dame took a big old dump on Saturday. They just don't have the athletes at this point to consistently compete with the state schools and USC.¹ What they should do (and what they're probably doing already, since they're smarter than I am) is identify the smart kids early on and super-recruit them. Unless they're all stupid, which is a distinct possibility, and ND is screwed.
  
• Don't bother with Gilmore Girls this season, it's been god-awful so far. The new producers just can't cut it.
• The Wire has been predictably great so far this season.
  
• Scrubs is back on Thursday!
  
• Baseball Hall of Fame voting starts soon. The two most irritating figures from my childhood of sports, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Tony Gwynn, will get in. I cannot stand either of these people.
• Ripken should be obvious. Whitebread, bland, always-with-the-creepy-smile, on and on about how he loved the game, blah fucking blah. The establishment media loves this shit and predictably buys into it wholesale. Great, you played a bunch of games in a row. But you were easily the most talented player of your generation and you never became what you could have been if you had just taken a break once or twice a month. You *know* he hurt his team by playing too often and not being fresh by the end of the season. Does any of this get brought up in the mass fellating that his Ripken media coverage?
• Gwynn is similar. He is one of those guys who presents a great image of himself, as this jovial, roly-poly, safe for white america black guy, a stance which really irritates me and can't possibly be real.² And as a result, he gets very favorable press, based on his one skill, hitting singles. The fact is that Barry Bonds is about 800x the hitter Gwynn ever was or ever could have been, but you still hear about how Gwynn is the "best pure hitter ever", and that goddamn show of him talking with Ted Williams about the "science of hitting" always gets the nostalgists misty-eyed. Whereas you have Barry Bonds, keeping it real -- he's a dick, he knows it, and he's never tried to hide that fact, something that will always get my respect, if not the general public's.
  
• One thing you can be sure of is that Mark McGwire will not get in on the first ballot. First of all, yes he deserves it. For a good ten+ year stretch, he was the best power hitter in MLB, and that counts for something. But you will hear two reasons why he won't be in. The first is that he only hit homers. That's true, more or less, but he still has 583 of them, despite being hurt a lot. Then there's the steroid thing. What really hurts him (with me and the establishment media) is him pussing out at Congress. From the establishment's standpoint, it was basically an admission of steroid use, which in sports media world even the taint³ (see Sammy Sosa) is a capital offense. My problem is that he should have admitted it (if it was true, which there is still no proof of course) and told Congress to go fuck themselves. But he does deserve to be in the HOF.

---

Footnotes
1: Speaking of that how the hell does USC have the talent base that they have? They're a good private school, so I would assume they have great admissions standards (which is why Notre Dame, a school I probably couldn't get into (not that I tried), can't get the great recruiting classes of yore). I mean, they are in LA and have an incredibly hot coed fanbase, but something else is going on there...or else Pete Carroll is the greatest recruiter of all time.
2: See also Kirby Puckett.
3: *giggle*...taint...*belly laugh*

Labels: baseball, blog stuff, football, random, TV

For a dude as sophisticated as I am, I sure do love juvenile humor, specifically funny-sounding names or words. "Tea bag" and "tossed salad", no matter the context, crack me up. "Pianist" made me laugh for a good 15 minutes the other day. So I couldn't have been more pleased at this headline:

Dick Pole named Reds pitching coach

...

Labels: baseball

Dear Ryan,

Just because you may have used a piece of punctuation in a blog post doesn't mean you have a gimmick. Lots of wrestlers used the leg drop before Hulk Hogan. HOWEVER I don't think it's a coincidence that once ... started up, this happened:



There's a bit of a pattern there, don't you think? (Besides you ripping off Friends' gimmick, I mean.) 9/11 conspiracy theorists have more evidence than this.

Your pal,
Thomas E. Greaves, esq.

Labels: hater