Dear NotGraphs,

Many thanks,
Anonymous Emailer

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Young Charlie Manuel fills his shotgun shells with dried black-eyed peas. That way it just stings a little.

Young Charlie Manuel once benched all of West Virginia for not hustling.

While Loretta Lynn is rightly known as the “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Young Charlie Manuel is just as rightly known as “Damn Good Buddy to the Shenandoah Valley.”

Thanks to Young Charlie Manuel’s soothing presence and weather-predictive hinge joints, he remains to this day the world’s only certified Tornado Whisperer.

Young Charlie Manuel walked into one of Tokyo’s finest restaurants, and the staff knew immediately to prepare him an off-menu dish of squirrel meat and dumplings. He said upon sopping up the last swaths of gravy with a flaky buttermilk biscuit, “では、神を恐れるチャウチャウ、小さい相棒をありがとうございました。 y’すべての右である、知っているya’llですか?”

When Young Charlie Manuel needs to clear his head, he takes his black, street-illegal 1955 Olds 88 — the one with the aftermarket Piper J-3 Cub engine, which he and Rebel Dabney towed out of the junkyard with a battleship chain — out on the rural route and opens her up just a bit.

Young Charlie Manuel would probably be able to relax a bit more if he didn’t have a vast haul of corn liquor in the trunk and strap-bolted to the undercarriage of that black, street-illegal 1955 Olds 88.

Prolly be okay, though, since Young Charlie Manuel is deputized in every county that the creek runs through.

Did you see that shit? Young Charlie Manuel gunned her at the crest of that hill and easily cleared that doe and that opossum crossing the road. Woo-wee shit.

Young Charlie Manuel has, for several years running, been voted Meanest Sumbitch and Nicest Sumbitch in the Valley. Which one he presents you with pretty much depends on you.

Young Charlie Manuel would punch his way out of this dead-end town, ‘cept Young Charlie Manuel has always had thing for dead-end towns.

The next time someone in authority doesn’t survey a mounting disaster and mutter, “God Almighty Damn. Better call Charlie,” will be the first.

Ideally, he knows that the only way to get aholt of Young Charlie Manuel is by CB radio.

For everyone’s reference — and also for their moral improvement — here are two animated GIFs from tonight of Texas reliever Yoshinori Tateyama throwing his screwball (a pitch that Mike Fast, formerly of Baseball Prospectus and currently of the Houston Astros, documented with some precision last June) against a pair of Oaklanders.

Here, for a called strike, against the largely menacing Yoenis Cespedes:

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We are used to seeing Joe West throwing things out of various contexts. Here, we witness Joe West pre-throwing out — though we can be sure that whatever Joe is looking at, he is about to throw it out of his sight, once and for all.

What remains uncertain is the object of his glance — and the nature of said glance. (Does it suggest surprise? Horror? Does Joe West take offense? Is that just the way Joe West shrugs? Is a pig’s house about to be blown in? Is this a glance of fear? Fear of a burgeoning, medieval flatulence of which only Joe West is capable, only after certain meals? Who knows? Perhaps we can never know.)

But, after y’all vote, we will know what he saw. (Everyone knows that a public majority creates truth.) Please vote.

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La Terreur

It was that inveterate patriot Archibald Bunker, I believe, who once said “There is no prospect more frightening than that of a happy Frenchman.”

Indeed, ever since it was famously divided into three parts by Caesar himself, all Gaul has produced a singularly morose sort, noted mostly for their practice of gloomily smoking cigarettes and cursing a God whose existence they deny.

Regardless of one’s feelings apropos the Frenchman’s usual conduct, history suggests that it’s preferable to the alternative. In point of fact, the last recorded instance of a Frenchman desmonstrating something like enthusiasm was in 1794. A blood-stained sketch from that period depicts a grinning Robespierre beside a guillotine basket full of noblemen and -women’s decapitated heads.

Which is why, of course, the image embedded above — with panicked and trembling fingers, it goes without saying — arouses no little concern in the author. Nor is it anything less than a certainty that the photographeur responsible for said image is very, very dead.

Credit to reader Noah, who is currently living in La France and brought this blood-curdling image to the author’s attention.

From two of Jose Canseco’s columns at Vice.com:

The issue is very simple: If you’ve got friends and family, the more money you make the more you spend on them. So let’s say you spend half your money on them and the rest on yourself and the cost of living. It may so happen that during all of that you forget to pay your taxes. And then all of a sudden penalties and interest start to add up, and you’re in a pool of quicksand from which you cannot escape.

When you owe the government—whether it be state or federal—they are relentless when it comes to getting their money back. They institute incredible penalties and interest that almost makes it seem like they want to enslave you.

Let me tell you something: I hate politics. In fact, I’m very anti-politics. I don’t even vote because I think the current US government is involved in the worst form of corruption and legal extortion imaginable.

In my view, the last president who was fully respectable and good for the nation all-around was Abraham Lincoln, and that was a long time ago. Besides unifying the nation and outlawing slavery, he was also great in that movie where he fought all of the vampires and zombies. He is the baddest bad-ass president ever, no doubt. I mean, how can you not like a president who slays vampires? It’s impossible. I think all presidents—and everyone in government, really—should be forced to see Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. It’ll show them how it’s done.

Everything in his column archive is bizarre.

Evangelical patriot Jack Chick has admonished us against, among other things, Halloween and dirty Catholics. That much we know. What you may not realize is that Mr. Chick has of late undertaken the necessary business of warning the world about the wicked and iniquitous Carson Cistulli, who roams this earth spreading clap and bad ideas.

What, according to Mr. Chick, do you have to fear from this epicene waif who prefers fever-dreams of privilege to honest toil? Much, it turns out. For soul-thieving instance …

Carson Cistulli, upon threat of discipline from a dark force, encourages drug use among at-risk youths.

Carson Cistulli gives syphilis and AIDS to pregnant innocents.

Carson Cistulli, sub-rosa product of public schools, had a Wiccan teacher and from her he learned black arts and the finer points of animal torture.

Carson Cistulli, besides advocating a weak and mewling foreign policy, once murdered his own brother. This was the only act of anything resembling physical courage in Carson Cistulli’s foul-smelling life.

Go and tell others what Jack Chick has taught you about Carson Cistulli.

I was all sorts of excited when, over a year ago, I heard someone say, “…Paul Thomas Anderson film based on the life of L. Ron Hubbard that takes place on a yacht…”

This past weekend, I witnessed the culmination of that idea when I saw The Master.

The Master has nothing to do with baseball, really. Baseball is never mentioned in the film; there’s nary a glimpse of a baseball bat or glove in any of the scenes, so far as I can remember. But, as I was trying to make sense of the film, I noticed some connections between Lancaster Dodd (the character based on L. Ron Hubbard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Kansas City Royals General Manager, Dayton Moore. To wit:

They both are committed to an obscure idea — for Moore it’s the Process, for Dodd it’s the Cause — that cannot be explained by logic, and that require blind acceptance from their faithful. (Coincidentally, “processing” is what the Cause offers to prospective members.)

Moore, The Master

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