This summer I picked up some 1971 Sports Illustrateds at a garage sale. After meticulously reading the issues while in the john, here are some of the ads I found intriguing.
Because cleats work better when they are sticking into your foot.
At times and perforce, the homilist’s greatest rhetorical device is knowing when to fall silent and allow the miracles to unfurl in that silence, like an abundant dong released from its underthings. Now is such a time …
Now go and live this day as though it be your last.
(A Minnesotan’s passion: @ratsoff)
I normally make a point to avoid spiders, mostly because I have it on good authority that they want to kill me. But this spider?
This spider is different. This spider could knock on the oaken door of my boudoir, and I would open it and, while wearing something uncomplicated, invite him in to ravage me. Baseball Spider, I would say, do with me what you will. Go Twins, I would also say.
(Image and underlying genius courtesy of 365 Spider)
Add the following to the running list of things that will quite possibly murder you in your sleep tonight:
In addition to the trail of dead, you will know Fell and Murderous Baseball Clown by his jester’s tassles-prison jumper-jorts-FMBs (latter not pictured) ensemble and Buttcheeks of Villainy. This is the last thing you will see before you are brutalized in your nightclothes. Fell and Murderous Baseball Clown is a killing machine and thus at the mercy of his factory settings. In all other regards, the word “mercy” is lost upon him.
Tonight you shall die.
A cursory look into Bob Anderson and his wikipedia page last week uncovered one of the wackiest plays in baseball history. Of course, it made sense to diagram it.
Dear NotGraphs,
I recently started dating a girl who has no idea how intense I am about my fantasy baseball league. I’m afraid she’ll freak out when she finds out about how I print out multiple spreadsheets to prep for Draft Day, frequently slobber over prospect reports and field trade offers in the shower. I know I cannot be the only person in this situation so I think it would make for an excellent column on the site.
(note: this is an actual e-mail from an actual reader, swear on my fantasy team.)
Dear Reader,
I hate to start off attacking the premise of the question, but, dude, she knows. I know you don’t think she knows, but she does. Women are skilled like that. My wife comes home and she immediately knows everything I’ve eaten, touched, looked at, anything. “You watched 30 Rock already? I thought we were going to watch it together!” “What? How do you know I watched 30 Rock?” “There’s a crumb of cereal on the floor near the couch, that I can somehow see from fifteen feet away. So I know you were eating cereal on the couch, and so I know you must have been watching something on TV while you were eating it, and since there was nothing else on the DVR, I know you watched 30 Rock without me.” It’s like “The Mentalist.” Which I also watched on the DVR without her.
Wow, I thought ads in U.S. sports were getting out of hand — you can hardly see Mr./Sr. Yoenis Cespedes after he whomps the ball.
Oh, and for all us non-Spanish speakers, just a moment after the advertisement disappears, we can hear a proper pronunciation for “Cespedes.”
In my mind (which is largely the only place I hear wOBA or WAR or BABIP pronounced), I have been saying ces-PED-ees. But it sounds more like the pronunciation might be CES-peddehz real fast-like, y’know, to make it look like you can actually with comfort speak a second tongue.
Well, congrats to Cespedes. How’s it feel to blast homers knowing each additional majesty-arch (a fancy new name for home runs) is like a crank on the cash register (except cash registers don’t crank anymore — plus team rarely pay from cash registers anymore; most use simple Funds Devices that transfer paychecks directly to the nearest Cadillac dealership)?
It feels good, I imagine.
Dear friends,
I’m sorry. Today, I wanted to write an article about that sport we all love. No, not professional jai alai. That’s much purer at the amateur level, where gamblers have only managed to corrupt and fix half of the matches. I’m speaking, of course, about baseball. It was going to be a great NotGraphs post, full of obscure references to 18th century British architecture, 19th century German philosophy, great 20th century mustaches, and of course, Dick Allen.
Alas, my go-to (okay, lets face it, my one and only) source for research, Wikipedia, was blanked out all day yesterday when I wanted to be preparing for this post. It was a total bummer. There was something about Congress taking away my ability to ever use the Internet again….Meh, it was probably nothing.
Anyway, since I have no way of confirming the following information, here are some important facts that might be true that I can’t verify:
Read the rest of this entry »
Thanks to the presumably fine folks at Rising Apple, I have learned of the existence of pop artist David Kushner. I surveyed his Etsy page in the manner of a man about to spend money on things his wife will neither understand nor outwardly countenance, which, it turns out, is precisely what I am. Why am I so tempted to part with U.S. currency that would be better deployed in the service of things known widely as “basic essentials”? Eyeballs awake:
And …
I loathe the Mets of the 1980s, but, as with Goya’s macabre explorations of the Inquisition, sometimes sanctioned repugnance of awful scale yields pretty pictures. So it is with all of this.
And now I shall sell whatever copper plumbing I can find in order to commission a portrait of Ted Simmons necking with Lola Falana.
SWEET MERCIFUL HEAVENS, WHY WAS I NOT
INFORMED OF THIS MAN SOONER?!
The name. The scraggly mustache. The hair, flipped out like my older sister loved to do in high school.
Not only is Pete LaCock’s family name LaCock — which is French (which he spoke) for “the cock” — but his first name is Peter, which means “rock.” Also, according to my Chrome dictionary app: