Archive for Aqua Velva Men

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.

Wait, I definitely recognize one of them. Maybe that other guy seems vaguely familiar.

Buried in the Minneapolis Star Tribune story titled “Ex-Twins Dickey, Slowey scale Mount Kilimanjaro” is this nugget:

While Mets management tried to discourage Dickey from the arduous pursuit, the Rockies were fine with Slowey going ahead.

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Update: The voting is closed.  Old Hoss Radbourn, quite properly had the most votes with 94.  We’ll use that as a baseline, assuming no one could be foolish enough to not vote for him.  75% of 94 is 70.5.  We’ll round down to 70.  Which means that our inaugural Ron Swanson Baseball Hall of Fame class is as follows:

Old Hoss Radbourn, 94 votes

Ty Cobb, 89 votes

Nolan Ryan, 80 votes

Jeff Bagwell, 70 votes

Lou Gehrig, 70 votes

Frankly, that seems reasonable.  You win this round, John Locke.

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When our country was born, our founding fathers mistakenly bestowed upon us a republic, in which the will of the people would determine the course of our nation, rather than an enlightened despotism based on the whims of Ron Swanson, as Thomas Hobbes had been advocating all along.

And so, since our Belovéd Swanson is barred from ruling by decree due to the Constitution and the fact that he is indeed fictional in nature, it falls to us, the multitude, to choose for him who belongs in his Baseball Hall of Fame.  I don’t like it any more than you do, but such is the will of John Locke, who fricking ruins everything.

Yesterday, you recall, we proposed several candidates.  Today, we will choose the introductory class for the Ron Swanson Baseball Hall of Fame.  Everyone on the original list I proposed, as well as those players and managers both nominated and seconded in the comments section are available for your vote, and you can vote for multiple candidates.  As with the regular Hall of Fame, a candidate requires 75% of the vote to make it in, unless no one achieves that threshold, at which point, we’ll just give it to the top three vote-getters or something.  It should be chaos…glorious chaos…which will demonstrate once and for all how stupid John Locke was.

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Whether you know it or not just yet, you are a devotee of the greatest of men.  No, I’m not talking Wally Moon.  I’m not talking about Dick Allen.  I’m not even talking about Vin Scully.  I am talking, dear friends, of Ron Swanson.

Swanson, the heavily-mustachioed dynamo whose presence elevates NBC’s Parks and Recreation from sublime to divine comedy, is equally skilled in woodworking, meat preparation, hoarding gold, saxamaphone, avoiding his job, and dispensing warm and sincere advice.  His Pyramid of Greatness is not a mere suggestion.  It is an essential way of life, if we are ever to save ourselves from ourselves.

And so it was with great enthusiasm this afternoon that I waded into a Twitter discussion spurred by Wendy Thurm about whether Ron Swanson would elect Jack Morris to the Hall of Fame on the basis of his mustache.  My position, that Swanson would not respect Morris’ mustache given that it looked like an unkempt squirrel who came to rest and slowly aged on Black Jack’s upper lip, was not expressed.  But my firm belief, that if Ron Swanson told us to we should immediately elect Jack Morris, was.

Indeed, it’s my belief that, not only should Ron Swanson’s position on Jack Morris carry the day, but his position on all baseball players should be considered sacrosanct.  And it is in this spirit that I ask you to help me choose Ron Swanson’s Baseball Hall of Fame.  The following is a list of nominees.  Feel free to add your own in the comments.  We shall show New Hampshire how democracy is done tomorrow when we vote on the candidates.

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As the Internet teaches us, it’s Hall-of-Fame voting season, which means a bounty of carefully nursed grudges and logic tortured to the brink of demise. The actual, bricks-and-mortar Hall of Fame is a lovely place that is worth your time and U.S. currency. Those charged with populating the Hall of Fame, however, are in not small part bloated, slappy harlequins with no sense of proper mission or context. Thus, Dick Allen’s — Mister Dick Allen’s — criminal absence from Cooperstown.

The good news, however, is that Mr. Dick Allen, despite the chronic neglect, is as healthy and confident as something unimaginably confident and healthy. And that leads us to this enduring truth …

Mr. Dick Allen — he’s just fine, thanks.

The child doesn’t want to sleep because of the wonderment about him. Why would one enter, of one’s own volition, that state of soft death when there is so much to absorb? The adult, in contrast, embraces the coward’s sojourn known as sleep because he realizes a consciousness-less existence — a numb, unfeeling life on ice — is in so many ways preferable to the waking one. These little tastes of the abyss ready us for the unending, unswerving one to come.

So it follows that when the human animal begins taking naps, begins looking forward to the captive embrace of suspended animation, the slide toward the grave has begun. Sleep is for those who are in on the joke and have figured out it is not funny but rather horrifying down to our decomposing bones.

And then there is Tug McGraw, who, in the face of all evidence, seemed … happy.

Tug McGraw almost certainly did not nap. Tug McGraw was like a kid out there. We miss you, Tug Damn McGraw.

Since John Buck has the name of a Dodge City sheriff with nothing left to lose, it’s somewhat fitting that he’s a hero in real, actual life:

Buck ran to the overturned car and went to work with two other Good Samaritans.

Buck and a bus driver who stopped to give assistance were able to help the car’s driver crawl out of a window of the upside-down car. Buck and another man pulled the passenger out.

So what does one do when one has nowhere left to turn? Who can save us? To whom should all distress calls be directed? Who will stride loins first into mounting disaster? John Buck will …

John Buck can help.

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It should come as no surprise to you that Derek Jeter knows what the ladies like. And what the ladies like, particularly after a session of boozy coitus ‘neath a mirrored ceiling, are things they can sell on Ebay or give to their nephews:

Yankees star Derek Jeter, one of New York’s most eligible hunks since his split with longtime gal pal Minka Kelly, is bedding a bevy of beauties in his Trump World Tower bachelor pad — and then coldly sending them home alone with gift baskets of autographed memorabilia.

The Yankees captain’s wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kiss-offs came to light when he mistakenly pulled the stunt twice on the same woman — forgetting she had been an earlier conquest, a pal told The Post.

“Derek has girls stay with him at his apartment in New York, and then he gets them a car to take them home the next day. Waiting in his car is a gift basket containing signed Jeter memorabilia, usually a signed baseball,” the friend dished.

Which brings us to:

You will often hear those given to bemoaning bemoan the notion that Kids Today don’t play pickup baseball with the frequency or vigor that they did back in the days of the bemoaner. But, lo, there is good news! Thanks to an enterprising Japanese astronaut, we now know that any young stripling can hone his baseball chops with nothing more than a bat, a ball and a readily available zero-gravity environment. No need for friends or neighborhood confreres! Witness, my love:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsNFqMtNZvI&feature=player_embedded

He balked.

(HT: The Internet)

If you tuned in to this writer’s most recent appearance on FanGraphs Audio — and you surely did not — then you’ll know that when it comes to new Cardinals manager Mike Matheny, I could just eat him up. Mike Matheny — Handsome Mike Matheny — stirs up such feelings in me that I must put those feelings to American images and French song …

I don’t normally wear a tight-fitting bodice, but if I did it would’ve just ripped on its own. All thanks to you, Handsome Mike Matheny.