So, I was reading Dayn Perry’s highly informative post yesterday about putting your baseball hat in the dishwasher. Of course, I had to turn to Google to find out the answers to some burning follow-up questions, like:
(1) Can I also put a glove in the dishwasher?
(2) How about a bat?
When I discovered a truly horrifying piece of news from last summer that doesn’t seem to have gotten the attention it deserves.
Over at SB Nation, which has its own currency and standing military and everything, Jon Bois has done the blessed and necessary work of putting together the top 50 sports GIFs of 2011. I tell no tales when I say the Internet World Championship Belt is now around the handsome waist of Mr. Bois.
As is the case with all great acts of Internetting, however, I am left with questions. For instance, how is number five not number one? Another: When will the woman — the philistine bitch-face — in the following GIF be boiled in oil in the town square for the satisfaction and amusement of the right-wise? Click and then ready your pitchforks and torches …
Short of a public execution, which I understand is frowned upon by those who don’t realize Increase Mather was right about everything, I hope this lady breaks a shin once a year for the rest of her life and gets pregnant with triplets at age 52.
Klout is perhaps the stupidest thing to happen to social media, it in itself not exactly high art. If you haven’t heard of Klout, it allows you to see how “influential” you are on Twitter and Facebook based on some kind of algorithm Klout probably makes up as it goes along. I myself am a 53, whatever that means.
One of the other, mostly insane, things about Klout is that it allows you to give other Twitter users a +K…again, whatever that is…designating their mastery of some subject, presumably as a sign to other Klout users as to who they should go to to decide what movie to see, or what car to buy. Thanks to my idiot co-blogger on The Platoon Advantage and heterosexual life partner, Bill, and his efforts, I am decidedly an expert on “Moms” (tread lightly, fellows, for the mom I’m an expert on could be your own).
And the best part is, it keeps track of you whether you sign up for it or not!
Anyway, here are the overall scores for your favorite baseball-related Twitter feeds (higher is better), and the other ridiculous topics on which your favorite people are also influential, according to Klout: Read the rest of this entry »
As I am wont to do, I was recently reading Woman’s Day and ran across this championship bit of information, which was under the ever-evolving rubric of “Things You Can Put in the Dishwasher”:
4. Baseball Hats and Visors
“The dishwasher is a fantastic way to make sure hats keep their shapes,” says Linda Cobb, a cleaning expert who is also known as the Queen of Clean. Put hats on the top rack, head opening down, on a separate wash cycle from dishes because you can’t use dishwasher detergent (many contain bleaching agents). Instead, fill the detergent cup with borax, found in the supermarket laundry aisle. Run a regular cycle without the heated dry option, then place hat over a glass or jar to dry. Reshape brim while damp.
Slipping in (tee hee) a transparent double entendre like “reshape brim while damp”? That’s sooo Woman’s Day.
This has been a post about putting your hat in the dishwasher. This is the offseason.
Most of the things I did today are shameful, and concern for the reader’s modesty forbids me from recounting them (i.e. those things I did) in these pages. Among the less shameful activities in which I engaged, however, was to visit the very excellent Grey Matter Books in Hadley, MA, and buy the book you see pictured here, lying on a friend’s rug.
A Baseball Winter: The Off-Season Life of the Summer Game is an account of the 1984-85 offseason of five clubs: the New York Mets, the California Angels, the Atlanta Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Cleveland Indians. As editor-authors Terry Pluto and Jeffrey Neuman note in the Acknowledgments, “its focus [is] on the backstage aspects of the game: contract negotiations, trade talks, in short, the games as it is played off the field.”
Having read the first 10 or so pages, I can speak to one of the book’s virtues — namely, that it’s written in diary form, with three- or four-page entries for each (or most) of the days of the offseason. The style lends itself to a sort of urgency, a sense of witnessing the events as they unfold, that’s very pleasant.
In this criminally underviewed youtube link, MVP and crazy face Maury Wills is singing “Somebody’s Keeping Score.” You may not know that Wills was an accomplished banjo player. Also, how come teams don’t do albums like this one anymore? Barry Zito, where are you?
Let’s have a toast to one of the least deserving MVPs and most incompetent managers of all time, and to this big pile of sacks.
Albert Pujols was here.
Among the playlists by which MLB.com classifies the videos at their internetting site is one called Must C. It’s in this category that one finds particularly noteworthy (i.e. “must see“) moments captured on film.
As part of the “Must C” conceit, each video is assigned a word that begins with that letter (i.e. C). One can find, for example, among the most recent selections “Must C Championship: Cardinals clinch 11th title” and “Must C Craig: Craig blasts a homer, makes great grab” and “Must C Clutch: Freese ties it with a two-run double”.
As we enter the 2012 season, there will undoubtedly be occasions on which the MLB.com editorial team will be tasked with producing c-words under great pressure. We at NotGraphs humbly submit the following three words, which also happen to be the three c-words most recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
C-Word: Chemtrail
Example: Must C Chemtrail: Pujols launches homer, sprays chemical agent at high altitude as part of secret government program.
C-Word: Chermoula
Example: Must C Chermoula: Pujols shares his favorite Mediterranean dishes.
C-Word: Challan
Example: Must C Challan: Pujols issues an official form or document, such as a receipt, invoice, or summons.
All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
– Sun Tzu
The nomination process, which is not unlike an Iowa Caucus of undaunted clap sufferers, is complete, and the Committee for Acceptable Outcomes has pared the list down to 10. At stake — at dirty stake — is the nickname, “Science or Bravery?”
As always, if you are not prepared to vote in accordance with the wishes of the Utmost Culminating Exchequer, then please report to the nearest mass grave. Forthwith!
Thank for you exercising the franchise.
There was a fine tradition established in 2011 in which Dick Allen found himself inserted forcefully, but sensually, into various great works of literature spanning many eras and genres. And thereby did we elevate those works to heights of literary genius previously unseen by man’s imperfect eyes.
It is with pride, then, that the Royal We happily carry this tradition on into what is sure to be a most historic new year of inserting Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.
Today, Dick Allen’s name goes to war, inserted into Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and a mystery is solved:
Chapter VII
While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh dick allen get me out of here. Dear dick allen please get me out. Allen please please please allen. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear dick. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Dick. And he never told anybody.
And now we know why Dick Allen is not in the Hall of Fame. Nobody ever gave him credit for anything.
