Last night I was drinking in a bar in Chicago, mostly because drinking in a bar in Chicago is what sustains me and allows me to suffer existence. So I was drinking a selection of German lagers when I saw this hanging above the bar:

I am aware that the photo is sideways. I have the skills and even the will to right things in this regard, but the awry-ness of it suggests a certain absurdity and even a soft defiance of a kind. So it shall stand.

Pictured above, I am told, is “the owner’s brother.”

The owner’s brother is not a man who uses “high tea” as a verb. He is not a man at all; lo, he is a damn man. There are damn men who smoke while fishing. The owner’s brother is not such a damn man. There are damn men who fish while smoking. The owner’s brother is indeed such a damn man.

He probably favored that shirt because it lets the guns breathe a bit on a summer day. He’s probably not sure that the Cubs really are America’s team. He’s entirely sure that he’s about to take a piss off the boat slip.

Owner’s brother, let’s you and I make it through another day.

(Gratitude most righteous to Noel for his beery companionship and flash photography)

In 1988, David Palmer once took to the bases and, upon arriving at third, perpetrated this:

GIFSoup

Look at David Palmer flopping about like an astounded halibut. Just look at him.

This is the offseason, and I have been making a GIF out of footage from a game in 1988.

A line — a beautiful line — from Charles Baudelaire:

See on these canals those sleeping boats whose mood is vagabond; it’s to satisfy your least desire that they come from the world’s end.

A line put to action:

Look at David Nied! Just look at him!

David Nied is playing a boy’s game in a god’s country! Is that a cowhide baseball or a frosty snowball, both totems to a lad’s insouciance! The promises of youth! The crisp air in one’s lungs! The ball taking determined flight from the determined hands of a Young Man of America! Who cares if his paymasters will force him to pitch in Mile High Stadium! David Nied, Young Man of America, can do this!

David Nied failed.

This is Vic Tayback’s grave:

(Thanks, I guess: Old Time Family Baseball)

Today’s News in Pictures:

This has been Today’s News in Pictures. This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

(Tiger-striped Zubaz pants: BTF)

The nomination process — the bloody, gristly, indisputably felonious nomination process — is done. And our appointed and empowered and empaneled think tank, The Institute for the Right-Wise and Permissible, has winnowed the list down to 10 names, each of which is right-wise and permissible. So vote correctly, lest a stew be made of your loins and children …

Thank you for exercising the franchise, dead man.

Casey McGehee or Sterling Honorheart?

Both are there for those with nowhere left to turn. Both stand when a lady enters the room. Both would prefer not to fight but will if pressed. Both eat their vegetables and have firm handshakes. Both begin each morning with deep knee bends and prayer. Both shall take back the streets.

I must ask again: Casey McGehee or Sterling Honorheart?

(Bang and a boom: Lifetime Topps)

What we do is assign cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuate the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames. Last time out, Nyjer Morgan laid authoritative claim to the nickname “Dionysus with Rabies“. So Mr. Morgan has been added to our Hall of Honouur, which is so stately, so regal, so much itself a celebration of the Norman Conquest, that an extra British-English unstressed “u” is required for proper spelling …

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Perhaps it is because I’ll turn 40 this week. Perhaps it is because Carson and I recently discussed Rob Wilfong. Perhaps it is because it is the offseason, and one does what one must in order to abide it. Or perhaps it is because I live close enough to Wisconsin that occasionally the Dairy State’s aesthetic courses through me unannounced and untrammeled. Whatever the reasons, the author chose to costume himself in an actual, real-live mustache for a period of roughly 24 hours. If not for his wife’s plenary powers over such affairs, he might still have it. Still and yet, for a time — for a fugitive, halcyon time — we were kings, you and I …

This is the offseason, and I grew a mustache.

It comes as no surprise that yesterday’s junket into the damnably handsome mind of Young Kevin Youkilis lit the Internet on fire and then made love to the flames. Were the writer’s interpretations chillingly accurate or nothing more than odious revisionism? On this matter, the Republic is as sharply divided as a fraction with rocky chasm running through it and within that chasm a painstakingly sustained demilitarized zone and within that demilitarized zone a river and a fence with razor wire and giant, violent border chickens — talons brandished, natch.

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