The nomination process, which was, at heart, a bacchanal of trash and thunderclaps, is complete. Now all that remains is the voting, which will be supervised by the Lidless Eye of Right-Wise Outcomes. You, ballotteer, are tasked with choosing among the chosen. Which of the 10 baseball-ists to follow should forevermore be known as “A Garbage Truck That Runs on Lightning”?

Vote carefully, citizens, for ward heelers are authorized to slaughter you on whim …

Thank you for exercising the franchise.

What we are doing is assigning cool nicknames to players rather than the opposite, which is a bloodless tradition that has been with us too much and too long.

So how does this running feature differ from the dear, departed exemplar of the genre? “Nickname Seeks Player” was devoted to active base-ball-ists, while “Nickname Seeks Former Player” is the province of those who no longer play this fine game because they are dead in spirit and perhaps also dead in the corporeal sense. Boileryard Clarke? Eligible! Sal Maglie? Eligible! Fred Lynn? Eligible! Dontrelle Willis? Eligible! Pete Rose? Asshole!

You may surmise from this that almost the entire sprawl of baseball history lies before you, like a sexy patient etherized upon a table. So prepare yourself to plumb both depths and heights as we ponder fitting candidates for this week’s name to nicked: “A Garbage Truck That Runs on Lightning”!

Before we proceed, though, let us remember those who have previously survived this crucible of sturdy ghosts. You’ll recall that last time out, Ted Williams laid somewhat extralegal claim to the nickname “Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.” So now let us — snifters in hand, cardigans beswaddling our mortal parts — gaze upon The Fireside Mantel of Reposed Fortune-Hunters:

“Museum of Questionable Medical Devices” – Ted Williams

And now … “A Garbage Truck That Runs on Lightning”!

Implications and Intimations

A few days ago, my four-year-old male spawn accompanied me to put petrol in our shitty van. We had an exchange that went something like this:

“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Did we just get gas?”
“Yes.”
“Do garbage trucks run on gas?”
“Yes, they do.”
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Can garbage trucks run on lightning?”
“Absolutely.”

And here we are. A garbage truck is something frowned upon by people who drink wine and talk about market corrections. But garbage trucks are, if you think about it, both bad-ass and necessary. A garbage truck that runs on harnessed lightning? Exquisite savior to the world.

So we’re thinking of a player disliked by awful people, awesome in secret, powered by vivid fulminations.

Who, citizens of sufficient origins, should be nicknamed “A Garbage Truck That Runs on Lightning”?

The handsomist is no doubt aware that the fairer, substantially more impregnate-able sex loves nothing so much as the sight of a Gentleman at Work. As the succeeding action-news footage will prove, this is especially the case when the handsomist in question is one Johnny Damon, with beard of might and pecker of firebolt …

My only disappointment? Whatever the young lady has on her finger made me think, for a fugitive moment, that she was smoking a cigarette — a Virgina Slim, one assumes — in the stands. And only with a cigarette is the already beautiful and multitudinous elevated to the sublime.

And so I invite you, Lady of Claret Breeches, to watch me blog some time from atop my ordure. Would you not be similarly titillated, Lady of Claret Breeches?

(HT: The prepossessing Big Daddy V)

You may recall that we recently presented the reader with every appearance of a meaningful and democratic vote on the nickname “Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.” It turns out that Barry Bonds, by a rather leisured margin, won the voting. Established practice would suggest that the nickname is now his. But, lo, the powers that be are as capricious as the nuts of lightning!

As such, it took but a simple peasant’s Internet comment to derail the process. Witness:

Egad, the lad has a point!

The nickname is “Museum of Questionable Medical Devices,” and Ted Williams, of course, had his coconut preserved in scientific pickle brine in the hopes that he would one day return to take back the streets. As such he seems an impossibly fine match for the nickname “Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.” On the other hand, the people — just look at them — have already spoken in their wee voices, and they want Barry Bonds. The best compromise at this point is a Final Vote Showdown Final. And that is what you shall find below …

Thank you for exercising the franchise.

Study closely the countenance of American Baseball Broadcaster Jeff Huson …

You’ll note the solemn look of disapproval in tandem with the finest in Evangelical’s Choice Menswear and Hair Tonic.

The entirety of it provides Huson with a mise en scène that is known variously as “Pastor Cocaine” or “Comptroller of Jonestown.” The look suggests a glowering reproach directed not at unruly adolescents but rather at the repugnant iniquities of those Mather brothers, Cotton and Increase. It also suggests a long history of groped receptionists and several powdery lines of fucking primo white lady followed by sweaty prayers hollered into a cordless microphone.

In closing, Jeff Huson might be going to hell but not before he sends you there.

The category “Men Surrounded by Things” — known colloquially and widely as “The People’s Category” — returns today with the nearly great Urban Shocker surrounded by things both urban and of a shocking nature …

This has been “Urban Shocker Surrounded by Urban Shockers.” This has been “Men Surrounded by Things.” This has been my toil.

Via thief of hearts Yirmiyahu comes urgent breaking news regarding the stat line of Red Sox 18th-round draft choice Shaq Green-Thompson. Mr. Green-Thompson is currently plying his trade in the rookie-level Gulf Coast League, and his bestowals to date defy belief, explanation and one’s capability to impart basic facts:

Woo, shit. Look at that.

We are doughy. Often — disconcertingly often — our flatulence is so severe that we require a nap in order to prepare ourselves for our regular nap. We have lost weight just twice in our lives: once when we got food poisoning after eating Gaines Burgers at the movies and once when we slept for 96 straight hours after walking up the street to Baskin-Robbins and back. We are barely ambulatory. We manage to combine scarcely prehensile hot-dog fingers with wrists as reedy as reeds. We are not athletes, unless drawing 30 wheezy, loaded-chili-cheese-fries breaths per minute while taking up the entire sofa counts as a jockish endeavor.

So this brings us to a necessary and urgent query: Could we, in such foul-smelling disrepair, replicate Mr. Green-Thompson’s performance to date? That is, could dumb, ugly we strike out 25 times in 26 at-bats, ground out weakly once and back into five walks? Or would we fare even worse?

Call-to-action Internet poll!

Thank you for exercising the franchise. Also, thank you for yelling for your wife to come downstairs and hand you the remote.

The nomination process, which necessarily entailed the besoiling of things theretofore unsoiled, has climaxed, withdrawn, rolled over, and drifted off to sleep while reading a Buffalo Wild Wings delivery menu. Now all that is left is the voting.

Debauched functionaries have whittled down the list to a manageable 10, and from those 10 names you will choose one. That chosen one, because he was a super-tuffy and or scurrilous mountebank, shall forevermore be nicknamed “Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.”

Choose carefully, citizens, for those more important than you are watching …

Thank you for exercising the franchise.

BUSYTOWN, U.S.A. — When Mayor Fox of Busytown was merely Young Fox, he frequented the old-line immigrant swim clubs in the Busy Hill section of the since-industrialized Northeast Side. The story, still told in taverns with the whiff of the apocryphal but the essence of truth, is that Young Fox, debauched yet aspirational, was once set upon by a roving gang of Bulgarians. He was beaten savagely and left half-naked in the gathering cold.

Mottled with blood bruises and still hypothermic, Young Fox showed up back at the club the next day, as he had been warned not to, and strode with purpose to the same ruffians who had brutalized him the day before. “I’ll not forget what happened,” he said. “And you don’t forget this: there is more of me than there are of you.”

They laughed. “But there is only one of you,” one of them said.

“And now you understand,” Young Fox told his new enemies.

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When you lay rheumy eyes upon Miguel Batista’s abovely pictured Gentleman’s Ensemble, the first words upon your lips — upon them like libidinous kisses from Joan Collins and Adrienne Barbeau — might be: “Why is he wearing that?” They should not be. The first words upon your lips — upon them like the unbound breasts of Susan Anton and Billy Dee Williams — should be: “Why am I not wearing that?”

Unless, of course, you are wearing that. In which case, as you were.

As for Don Miguel, the coattails trail his deliberate, Crockett-&-Jones steps like the unrequited feelings of the countesses and sultanas he has known.

(HT: Gentleman Jay Jaffe)