From Russia With Love

So, I was reading Pitchfork the other day and streamed a song from some band called 'Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin' if only for my love of early 1990s Russian leaders. The craziest part about the whole thing is that they're good, and not just good in the 'hey, they're better than you'd expect' way, but actually good. They're so good that I wrote them and told them of my joy:

Dear People Associated w/ the magic that is Someone Still
Loves You, Boris Yeltsin,

I wanted to contact you to let you know that since 'discovering' your music yesterday there have already been two significant changes in my life. First, as a direct result of having to google you repeatedly, I have indeed learned how to spell the former Russian President's name. Also, I enjoyed your music so much that I actually purchased it, and not just from iTunes either, but from Polyvinyl, so I will receive an actual CD, like with a case and everything. I wanted you to know that.

I heard you were recording / divining a new album. I hope
that Polyvinyl will grant you a shiny new tourbus that will take you to Boston.

Best regards,

M. Rybacki

If you want to hear SSLYBY, try these recordings from a studio session somwhere in Iowa http://www.daytrotter.com/article/6/free-songs-sslyby.

What He's Done

"I'm angry that that what I've done for the game of baseball and the personal, in my private life, what I've done, that I don't get the benefit of the doubt."
- Roger Clemens (60 Minutes)

"It kills me that this is happening to my dad. What he's done for the game and what now is being turned back to him for what he's done for the game is tough."
- Koby Clemens (Associated Press)


What has Roger Clemens done for the game of baseball?

Undoubtedly one of the best pitchers of his generation, Clemens won an unprecedented number of Cy Young Awards, and is arguably the most dominant pitcher of the modern era. This makes him a great baseball player indeed, but Clemens has been fairly compensated. Over the course of his 21-year career, Clemens has earned more than $121 million in salary (http://www.baseball-reference.com) and this is to say nothing of endorsements, investments, etc. Clemens is (was) beloved, especially in his home state of Texas, where he and Nolan Ryan sit on the Mt. Rushmore of big, burly, Texas pitchers.

But if not for Roger Clemens, how different would baseball be? What makes Clemens any more important to the game, what more does the game owe him than it does Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez, or Tom Seaver? Baseball doesn’t owe anybody for its success or popularity. There’s a very short list, in fact, of individual players that deserve recognition for what they’ve done for the game.

Babe Ruth - Baseball’s first larger than life superstar, Babe Ruth is credited for baseball’s defining surge in popularity in the 1920s. He was a sheer force of nature, the homeruns, the bravado, the personality; Babe Ruth wasn’t only the game’s greatest player, but remained ‘the face of baseball’ decades after his playing career, and his life, had passed.

Jackie Robinson - If it weren’t Jackie Robinson, it would have been somebody else. Keeping black athletes out of the game was indefensibly racist, ignorant, and unreasonable, but it was also bad business sense. America was changing, slowly, but by the mid-to-late 1940s it was painfully clear that the Major Leagues didn’t have a monopoly on baseball talent. Some of the game’s best and brightest toiled in the Negro Leagues, and a lost generation of African-American players and fans would suffer. Jackie Robinson was not so remarkable because he was great. He was not so remarkable because he was black. Another owner, at another time, would have found another great black player to test the Major Leagues. Jackie Robinson was remarkable for his temperament, his consciousness, and his grace. It was absolutely vital that Major League Baseball’s first black player handled insult as easily as he handled pop flies, deflected hate-speech and racism like they were inside fastballs. For this, baseball owes Jackie Robinson perhaps more than any other player in the history of the game.

Curt Flood - Less heroic to owners and fans alike, Curt Flood became a cult hero among professional baseball players. In refusing to accept a trade after the 1969 season, he challenged the Major Leagues to defend its labor policies. Though he did not win the case, the matter reached the nation’s highest court, and Flood is credited with paving the way for free agency, a change that ushered in baseball’s modern era.

Cal Ripken Jr. - Cal Ripken Jr. resuscitated baseball’s image in the wake of 1994’s debilitating labor strike. After the cancellation of the World Series, fans punished the game with half-empty stadiums and lackluster television viewership. The culmination of Ripken’s consecutive game streak captivated the world, and as the clean-cut fan favorite closed in on one of baseball’s hallowed records, excitement reached a fever pitch. It can be argued that Ripken was the right man at the right time, that he ‘saved’ baseball’s image and paved the way for the sport’s late-90s resurgence.

Serious Thoughts About Money I Don't Have

In college I took one semester of Economics and got a C+ which obviously qualifies me to comment on the impending recession / market fluctuation / mortgage crisis / bump in the road / natural ebb and flow / apocalypse.

How did we get here? Let’s take a look:

(1) It’s pretty safe to say that the Industrial Revolution is old news, right? Anybody know anybody that works in a factory? No? We are now a service economy and an economy of thought leadership (product design, marketing, tech design, creative, etc.). We have been for a while now. So why do we support trade agreements and honor tax codes that were designed to benefit the old steel mills and workshops that moved overseas fifty years ago?

(2) When I was three my mom taught me this simple math. If I give you five apples, and you give me one apple, you’re getting four more apples than me. The export/import ratio from China to the US is 5:1. How do you like them apples?

(3) The budget deficit = more second grade math. If you have a hundred dollars, and you spend three hundred dollars, and you keep doing this, over and over again, and then you try to fix it by spending four hundred dollars, then five hundred dollars, YOU’RE AN IDIOT.

(4) The solution. Both Republicans and Democrats want to give us a tax rebate (increases the debt) and encourage us to spend it (on things that were likely made overseas). This is like trying to stop gun violence by giving people free knives.

Here’s a hypothetical. What if the Fed didn’t spaz out and cut rates ever time the Dow drops a hundred points? What if we stopped overspending, and put America on a budget? What if we reevaluated our trade relationships and protected American jobs? It seems to me that there are a lot of smart people, a lot of people who did better than a C+ in Econ 101, who want a gourmet meal in microwave time. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and there’s no quick fix.



*That being said, I’ll probably spend my $600 on a Nintendo Wii or something. Being a hypocrite sucks way less when you’re swashbuckling pirates in interactive 3D.

The List: My Favorite All-Time Non-Boston Athletes

Legitimate Category

Barry Sanders – My favorite non-Boston athlete of all time hands down. Every Lions game was must-see TV when I was little, even if they were like 6-10.

Gerry McNamara – The Pride of Scranton, PA! His guts-to-talent ration was off the charts. There’s a reason this guy is struggling in the new NBA D-League right now…he’s not that talented. That being said he had cajones and there was nobody in college basketball better than him in the last two minutes of a game. Nobody.

Phil Mickelson – Yes he’s goofy. Yes he’s smarmy. But even after he shed his lovable loser image, there was reason to root for him. I remember he was entering a playoff in some tune-up tournament a week before the PGA Championship and when he realized he had to play another three holes of golf he called his caddy over to go bring him a snack. Sure enough, Phil headed back out to 16 with a juice-box and some Smartfood, before dominating his hungry competition.

Brett Favre – I was standing on the field at Lambeau when on a third down just outside of field goal range (in overtime) Favre unleashed a deep ball to Antonio Freeman who was absolutely blanked by Viking cornerback Chris Dishman. Dishman jumped and deflected the pass then celebrated while Freeman writhed around on the ground, tipped the ball to himself and stormed into the end zone. Favre ran from the 50 yard line to the back of the endzone and did the Lambeau Leap. I was fifteen years old, and it was cooler than anything I’d ever seen…including boobs.

Marcus Camby* – Growing up in Western Massachusetts, I obsessed over the Sox and the Pats, but in the mid-1990s UMASS / Temple was like Yankees / Red Sox. Both my mom and dad went to UMASS Amherst, as did everybody else’s mom and dad, so when Camby and Calipari came and led the Minutemen to the Final Four, it was the first time that our parents simply couldn’t say no to anything. Hey mom will you buy me this $100 authentic UMASS basketball warm-up jacket? Hey dad can I get this limited edition UMASS pencil-holder? I even convinced my mom to skip Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt’s house to take me to the Basketball Hall of Fame to meet the players participating in the Tip-Off Classic. I remember meeting Camby and getting him to autograph my hat and then showing it to everyone at school, but only letting my best friends actually hold it themselves.

*Amherst is not Boston, ok?

Rediculous Category

Peter Crouch – One of the ugliest human beings on the face of this planet. He looks like Randy Johnson, has absolutely no ball-handling skills, but played a leading role on several of Liverpool’s title squads. I called him ‘bird man’ because he flapped his arms when awkwardly while running.

Chester McGlockton – When I was ten, my mom bought us the world’s largest Halloween pumpkin. It cost like $75 and lasted until the following June. I named it Chester because he was the biggest thing I could think of.

John Daly – I know everybody likes John Daly, but how could you not root for this guy. He drinks, he smokes, he eats chicken wings, he burps, he gambles, and he occasionally plays world class golf. He is an awesome perversion of the American dream and I love him for it.

Jim Harbough – He was like the second coming of Jim McMahon, plus he wore a hideous bandanna and he threw eight interceptions for every touchdown. But man, when he finally got that touchdown, it was awesome!

Detlef Schrempf – On name alone, one of the greatest athletes of all-time. I didn’t really like him so much as I liked his NBA Jam character.

John Starks – I always had an inexplicable affinity for the Knicks in the early-to-mid 1990s. Starks was crazy. He would score in these ten, twelve point binges and then challenge Alonzo Mourning to a fight.

Jay Buhner – Every at-bat either ended in a strikeout or a homerun. He was bald and he had the most awkward batting stance where he would face the pitcher then sidestep towards first base and unleash a furious uppercut, that I’m pretty sure he had little-to-no control over. I remember hearing about Jay Buhner Haircut Day where any Mariners fan that shaved his/her head bald could get into the Kingdome for free.

Modern Medicine

On Tuesday, I went with a friend to visit her father in the hospital. It was some kind of offbeat Jesuit hospital where the waiting rooms are staffed by statues of the Virgin Mary and the Chapel’s always open even when the cafeteria and the gift shop have long been closed.

We entered the building through a street level lobby, though the signs attempted to convince us it was the 4th floor. The second floor (6th according to the elevator) was pine fresh and lily white. We passed the nurses station and watched the hallway traffic hum with the ‘beep, beep, beep’ of heart monitors. I felt at ease now, reassured that the Jesuits hadn’t substituted holy water for penicillin, radiology for the rosary.

My friend’s father was in good spirits. He’s had a couple of heart surgeries over the years, and it’s always a bit frightening for the family when there’s complications. (There will always be complications.)

“How are they treating you?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said as my friend, a nurse herself, noticed that the one of the monitor cuffs was too tight, and another was restricting the movement of his hands.

“What did the nurses do to you?” she asked playfully, readjusting them for his comfort.

“I don’t know,” he told us. “They’ve been nice.”

“Seems to me they’re a bit flighty around here,” she said. Just then a nurses aid came into the room, apologized for the inconvenience, and proceeded to scotch tape a yellow paper to the wall beside the patient’s bed.

“Just a checklist,” the aid explained. “We’re trying to make sure everybody keeps their eyes on ball around here, pays attention to the details.”

She left before noticing that she’d taped the sign upside down.

Now I Park in the Woods

I pay $140 / month for a parking spot in somebody’s backyard. Sometimes my space is filled with snow. Sometimes there’s another car in my space, or a van. I am prepared for these situations. I have a shovel, a scraper, and some sand. I have a pad and a Sharpie. But what the hell am I supposed to do when my space looks like this?

I could try sanding the tree to death. Or write a nasty note and hope it goes away. Or I could run around outside in a blizzard like an asshole and drag tree limbs behind my head and thrust them into somebody else’s yard, clear my spot, and pray that I make it to work on time…but, oh, wasn’t the snow so pretty!

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

My mom is a huge Ohio State fan now after her experience at Second City in Chicago. She flew out to the Midwest for a couple of nights of shopping / fine dining / exploring and decided to take in a show at the Chi’s most famous comedy club. Unfortunately a busload of tourists from Ohio were there, dressed head to toe in Buckeye garb, clearly disappointed because the performers didn't start every line with “You know you’re a redneck when…”

My stepfather, Peter, was particularly enamored with a lovely beast in an old-fashioned knit sweater, the kind cheerleaders might have worn in the fifties, with the shoulder pads, bright hues, and block-letters stitched across the chest. She might have looked quite fetching had not her ensemble, hairstyle, makeup, etc. expired well before flannel shirts and snap bracelets. Ever curious, Peter leaned over and asked my mother, “Why is that lady wearing a shirt that says OH 10?” This was the first, last, and only time, Peter will ever feel dumb in a room full of Ohio State fans.

I thought it was a funny story until I came across this picture from college football’s National Championship coverage. Behold Peter’s redemption…Ohio’s brightest spelling out the school name at halftime of the National Championship game. The lady in the Oh 10 sweater must be coaching them!