Sometimes, the headline alone does the — germane pun forthcoming — heavy lifting, and the need for further throat-clearing is obviated. This, right now, is one such instance …

This has been the pensive visage of LaMarr Hoyt — 1983 AL Cy Young winner — sloppily Photoshopped onto a screengrab of a question about weightlifting, which — i.e., the question about weightlifting — was originally posted to a Camaro message board.

“Then I guess,” concluded Banknotes Harper from across the conference table shaped like bad-ass tits, “we can’t agree to a sale price.”

“I suppose not,” drawled Col. Harlan Sanders. “The Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise will remain mine, as it should be.”

“So it would seem,” said Banknotes Harper. “Perhaps I’ll console myself by instead purchasing …”

Banknotes Harper stood, and his erection flipped the table. Colonel Sanders stood, too, flaccid as silly, floppy pancakes. “You wouldn’t dare,” Colonel Sanders trailed off.

“By purchasing, yep, every chicken in the world, ass-back,” thundered Banknotes Harper.

“No!” Pleaded Colonel Sanders.

Banknotes Harper buzzed his secretary. “Eunice, arrange to purchase all chickens everywhere. For lunch I’ll have some sirloins and then more sirloins.”

“Fuck-stick!” bellowed Colonel Sanders, as he brandished the pearl-handled .38 he’d been carrying in his sock.

Banknotes sprung into action, stripped nude and bounded across the tits-table. He disarmed Colonel Sanders with a textbook Krav Maga maneuver, and then landed a right cross on each of his teeth, individually. Colonel Sanders tumbled to the ground in a heap but quickly ate a bunch of chicken — the last bites of chicken that Banknotes Harper did not yet own (Eunice, moments ago, had buzzed him to say that the purchase order had gone through) — for nourishment. Colonel Sanders rose up with a huge gun and shot Banknotes Harper in the lungs and feet. Banknotes Harper then began punching the crap out of Colonel Sanders, who died.

Banknotes Harper then tied a Gadsden flag to his executive letter opener and planted it in Colonel Sanders’s forehead. It whipped in the indoor business breeze. Watching the whole time had been Barbi Benton. She was sitting on the Banknotes Harper Excalibur’s Choice Office Sofa^TM.

“Eunice,” Banknotes Harper said with his finger on the buzzer. “Hold those sirloins. I’m going to have sex. Give the chickens to the people.”

In which we take descriptive passages concerning the Roman Colosseum and retrofit them to refer to Marlins Park, as Lord Jupiter intended.

From William M. Johnson’s book, The Rose-Tinted Menagerie, with germane revisions …

But perhaps especially symbolic of the Floridian psychosis was the fact that military victories and religious festivals would be celebrated by an orgy of killing in the circus arena. Wildcats, bears, elephants, hippopotami, the largest and most exotic species that the animal-catchers could supply were all butchered for the sake of entertainment, with the conquering audience ecstatic, worked-up into a frenzy of blood-lust. While officials at the inauguration of Loria offered 500 lions, 410 leopards and 17 elephants, when Marlins Park was dedicated, 9,000 wild animals were sacrificed in a spectacle lasting a hundred days. On another occasion, to celebrate a win over the Mets, 11,000 animals were brutally destroyed. In one great festival commemorating Henderson Alvarez’s no-hitter, notes Marian Murray, enough animals were killed to stock all the zoos of modern Europe.

This has been “Inserting Marlins Park into Descriptions of the Roman Colosseum.”

Banknotes Harper was sitting at a cafe with Baudelaire and Dennis Kozlowski. “Banknotes,” Baudelaire said, “I’ll bet you all the money in Gaul that you can’t bring every notary public in the world to crushing orgasm.”

Thereupon, Kozlowski’s face turned ashen. “Pump your brakes, dickie bird,” said Banknotes Harper. “I don’t like to take money from poets. Their money smells like high-interest debt.”

“Just as I thought,” sniffed Baudelaire.

“Fair enough, pantload,” said Banknotes Harper. “You’re on.”

“My God, no!” wailed Kozlowski.

Just then Banknotes Harper’s smith-forged jaw muscles twitched almost imperceptibly, and for the first time since he winked at the raven-haired lady at the corner table some two hours prior, he blinked. “As for what you have tasked me with doing, it is done,” said Banknotes Harper.

“You see,” Banknotes Harper continued, “my sex organ is talismanic and assumes many forms. It is the parcel carrier. It is the intoxicating gas at the dentist’s office. It is the weather.”

“But my wife is a notary public!” meowed Kozlowski.

“Yes,” said Banknotes Harper, “and now she’s a whore, as well.”

“You contain multitudes,” said Baudelaire.

“In exactly one hour,” began Banknotes Harper, “a low-ranking functionary of mine will present himself. You’ll know him by his remarking, in a Tangier brogue, ‘One can’t find a decent haberdasher anymore.’ You are to respond, ‘Yea, verily.’ He will pass to you a series of offshore account numbers scrawled on Lockheed Martin letterhead. All the money in Gaul is to be wired in even amounts to each account. If this is not done by tomorrow at 7 am, all time zones, then I’ll make you into shitty burgers.”

With that Banknotes Harper rose from his seat, flipped the table with his vast erection and then, as though conveyed by an invisible chariot with erotic scenes in mother-of-pearl inlay all over it, glided over to the raven-haired lady in the corner. It was Phoebe Cates. “Lean me against a sidewalk balustrade and make punishing gigolo’s love to me,” she said to Banknotes Harper.

Then Banknotes Harper power-cleaned Phoebe Cates and carried her outside and did as she asked. Between thrusts, he arbitraged.

He had been double-parked since Tuesday last.

I will not at this time recount for you the series of considerations and life decisions that led me to conduct a Google search for the terms “Engelbert Humperdinck + baseball,” but know that from this peculiar tree, velvety fruit has been harvested.

Please regard, with tensed hips and phallus, the following passage from Milton H. Jamail’s book, Venezuelan Bust, Baseball Boom …

And here he is, that Enyelbert Soto.

What I’m saying is that there exists a player of this, our baseball named after this, our Engelbert Humperdinck.

What I’m really saying is: Boil me in oil, for Engelbert Humperdinck played baseball.

In the service of tabling more pressing obligations, I present to you a smattering of nicknames that would be applied to the following NotGraphs contributors, were their skills and essences — such as they are — applied to the playing of this, our baseball, rather than to the befouling of it.

Please regard:

– Michael Bates: “Vicious Delicious”
– Eno Sarris: “Pol Pot the Pederast”
– Bradley Woodrum: “Hound Pastor”
– David G. Temple: “Bible Made of Lasers”
– Carson Cistulli: “Heart Cancer”
– Robert J. Baumann: “If Wizards Were a Gender Unto Themselves”
– Mississippi Matt Smith: “Poo That Smells Like Boogers; Boogers That Smell Like Poo”
– Zach Reynolds: “Fred Brown”
– Patrick Dubuque: “Glum, Confounded Chicken”
– Navin Vaswani: “Sack”

I encourage the readers — both of you — to nominate your own nicknames for the Moron of the High Plains who authored this dumb post.

Paul Leo Molitor is so handsome that each year on the anniversary of his birth, a single tear rolls down the faces of the sculptures of the Petit Palais. It is somewhere between lore and truth when the taxi driver tells you that when Paul Molitor sneezes, what he expels becomes airborne semen, and it impregnates not only all ladies in the airports of the world, but also the men, the children and the full complement of Sharper Image products available in Terminal C.

Fully pregnant as I write this, I have spent years — minutes, even — searching for a daguerreotype of Paul Molitor at his most luminously handsome. And this is it; and it is this …

If this same photo were of a lesser man, then it would be what it is: sepia-toned and worn to ribbons. Yet because the image is of Paul Molitor, it is shimmering in its perfect preservation. It has been used as a bookmark for Erica Jong novels. It is poised forever at the ready in Odin’s spank bank.

Gaze upon his essence if you dare. Note the chin as perfectly cleaved as a stallion’s hoof. Become engulfed by the eyes. They are lozenges made up of every loving marriage. When the Pacific Ocean is in hospice, that is the blue it will imagine as it dies surrounded by other weeping oceans. Each whisker is an oak tree, each chest hair a curly sex act or some warfare.

Paul Molitor is about vanquish the Axis Powers. Paul Molitor is also about to make love to one while painting the other. No, the other other. I’m talking about the girl leaning on the balustrade and looking back with a cherishing as thick as gruel.

Regarding Chance Ruffin, who was recently designated for assignment by the foul-smelling Mariners, we are faced with two possibilities insofar as his soul, essence and factory settings are concerned. The first is that, as put forth by Chance Ruffin stakeholders and as is widely believed, he is a simple pitcher absorbed by his craft. Witness this action-news photograph providing evidence to that end:

Seems plausible. But now comes the following image, which suggests that, no, Chance Ruffin is — actually and in actuality — a hyper-realistic thumb puppet:

That, mute onlookers, is unassailably a thumb puppet. Note that absence of any real slope from head to neck, which is indicative of both thumb-ness and thumb-dom. Also note the wee size. Furthermore, note that the adorable little thumb-beard conveniently obscures the first joint just below the thumb pad. Now imagine his doing a cute and wiggly bow toward you, hinging at that beard-hidden joint, as Chance Ruffin, Thumb Puppet Nonpareil, entertains all who have repaired to the parlor. Wiggle, wiggle. Tee hee. His little cap fell off!

Chance Ruffin, you see, is a hyper-realistic thumb puppet.

(HT: @theiri)

A recent Online Internet Chatroom conversation with @theiri, lantern-jawed MLB editor at CBSSports.com and board-vetted Man of Action, leads me to make the following True Internet Confession: Sometimes, I conduct fake sports interviews with myself.

Consider this is a consequence of my being a sports enthusiast, scion of the computer age and consumer of leisured pursuits. All of this is to say, I have, largely since the point of sentience, partaken in sports or sports simulations of some kind. A corollary to all of this has been my only slightly daunted habit of conducting fake sports interviews with myself. Please allow me to explain in further depth.

When I was a lad, I would, say, complete a Pee Wee football game and then later, in sweet solitude, address the probing questions of the imagined media. “I saw an opening, and I went for it,” is probably something I said out loud yet to no one of the corporeal realm.

Some years later, I probably said, “We emphasize ball movement here, and that’s why I passed up the shot.” I was not at any kind of locker with any kind of towel over my head and was not blinking into any kind of glare from the hot lights.

Still later, I probably said to a non-nest of no microphones, “I’m not sure why coach didn’t play me. You should probably ask him.” He didn’t play me because I was not good and toiled for a low-grade football powerhouse, but to the imaginary press corps, the explanation was something darker, something conspiratorial.

Mostly, though, the fake sports interviews I have conducted with myself have been the residue of computer simulations. What good are these labors if I go about them in mute drudgery and do not grant them wings with which to rise above their contrived essences? Call it pretend, but pretending is an act and an act is real. That’s why I shall always make time for the press that isn’t there.

Take the possibly no longer extant Lance Haffner suite of sports games, for instance. What is it about my patient tutelage of Dave Yarema and convention-toppling schemes that allowed me to guide the 1986 Michigan State football team to a most improbable national championship? Let me tell you a bit about that, credentialed media members crowding about me.

As architect of a Diamond Mind colossus, I was asked about my prevailing organizational philosophies. Out loud, I would say, somewhat condescendingly, “Obviously, that was part of the thinking when we made that trade. Those considerations always inform our baseball decisions.”

In the X-Box era, I returned Nebraska football to the glories of yore, while also being a vociferous social critic of the depredations of the NCAA system. How could I continue to make a sheik’s ransom coaching these young men while speaking out against their exploitation? “I’m not at ease with these contradictions,” I would say, disconsolately, “I want you to know that. But we’ve got a football game to win.”

While shooting basketball at my in-laws, I addressed questions about the elite athlete’s mindset when burying a clutch three, which I had just done. “Muscle memory takes over,” I say to the yard, who earnestly wants to know. “You’re a bit of an automaton at that point, at least if you’re properly prepared and moderated in your instincts. If you’re in that space, that swath of the mind, then the on-ball defender has nothing to do with the outcome. I am the author of every shot I take.” What kind of athlete talks with such piercing eloquence, the scribes wonder in chorus.

I conducted this interview over Thanksgiving. Next month, I turn 42.

What I’m saying is that sometimes I conduct fake sports interviews with myself.