In an effort to get this show off the air faster, ABC pulled a fast one on us, dear readers, and showed an episode last week, even though it had originally said the show was on hiatus until this Wednesday. Their skullduggery is your gain this week, though, reader, as you get a super-sized double review and recap of the last two episodes. So far, this series has gone to great lengths to demonstrate the awfulness of all of its characters, and to portray humanity as a greedy, oblivious, selfish, and devoid of empathy. Let’s see if they can do better going forward. Maybe the extra time off has caused them to reevaluate the general tone of this unfunny dreck. I mean, if it can’t be entertaining, maybe it can be pleasantly benign.

Nope, it turns out it can’t.

Episode Seven opens with the team “shagging fly balls” in practice. While your Little League team probably put players into positions and spread them out, Coach Terry and The Cannon instead let their players huddle in a mass of squirming, shoving 10 year olds who jockey for position, all shouting “I got it” over each other until all of them dive out of the way at the last second, and the ball falls to the ground. Let it not be forgotten that Terry and The Cannon are, in addition to being rotten people, terrible coaches.

While “Regional Safety Officer” Sheldon Bickle (a paycheck-cashing John Michael Higgins) looks on, one fly ball hits Dong square on the head when he forgets to put up his glove to catch it. This is accompanied by actual Looney Tunes sound effects. Horrified at the lack of medical attention Dong receives, Bickle orders both The Cannon and Dick, the misogynist league president, to attend “safety school” (safety schools being a concept this show’s creators are probably very familiar with).

Meanwhile, Coach Terry stays late after practice with Dudley (the fat kid) because his parents forget to pick him up for what sounds like the umpteenth time. They’re divorced, you see, and far more interested in hating each other than paying attention to their lonely son. They even refuse to attend his games, because, as his father says “It’s not my custody day. I got plans. And besides, do I want to sit in the stands with my ex-wife yelling at me?”

Read the rest of this entry »

“Even the Americans want to taste it.”

The author encountered this Compelling Advertisement on Thursday while walking along the Rue Ordener.

From it, one is able to infer certain, undoubtedly true facts — namely, that:

• With regard to bacon, its sheen is of some importance.
• With regard to fast-foot hamburgers, Americans are the arbiters of taste.
• Americans, additionally, are be-gloved at all times.

It was in 1946. July, I think. The Dodgers were playing the Cardinals. The game got out of hand by the fifth inning or so. The Dodgers were losing big. As I usually did during those times, I began telling stories to break up the monotony of the game. Well, for some reason — and to this day I still can’t for the life of me remember why — I began talking about Brooklyn’s pitcher Kirby Higbe. And I mentioned that though he was getting up there in age, he still was firing a pea of a fastball. Well, this fan that was sitting right in front of the press box took umbrage to that statement, and stood up to tell me so. He started cursing at me telling me I had no idea what I was talking about. Read the rest of this entry »

One imagines that the diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor is a particularly harrowing one for a 50-year-old person to receive — especially the sort of 50-year-old person who, by all appearances, derives fulfillment both from his private and professional life. Indeed, the only response of which I can personally conceive involves merely assuming the fetal position and cursing capital-F Fortune until such a time as my body stops functioning.

This doesn’t at all resemble late union head Michael Weiner’s particular strategy for dealing with his own diagnosis and subsequent illness. Indeed, it’s difficult to find news coverage of him in which he’s not expressly conceiving of life as a sort of luminous mystery.

Read the rest of this entry »

Things of substance are happening in Major League Baseball! Things like Prince Fielder and Ian Kinsler getting swapped. Things like A-Rod storming out of his arbitration hearing. Things like Chris Carpenter retiring. Who even KNOWS what kinds of substantial things will happen next?! Zowie! It’s the offseason! A time for sitting around waiting for things to happen! The American Dream!

BUMMER ALERT, THOUGH: One bummer about all the offseason substance is that we have to wait for it. We hate waiting! Take meals for example: We LOVE meals. Meals involve eating, and Americans are nothing if not prolific food-to-poop converters. If only we could have meals ALL THE TIME. Too bad our stupid bodies won’t let us consume 2300 calorie meals every five to seven minutes. Instead we’re stuck waiting for our lame-o corporeal vessels to “metabolize” that steak we had for breakfast. Luckily snacks exist! Snacks are the best. They let us use our mouths and tastebuds for 100% of the day. Check out this bitchin’ pie chart that I screen-captured from a freely available online slideshow on the state of the snacking industry:

What this pie chart shows is that we want something in our mouths at absolutely every possible moment we can have something therein. Showering? Have a Twix. Driving to da club? Have a bag of Doritos. Filing your taxes? Engorge thyself with some cracklin’ pork rinds. About to copulate with a comely dame? Engage in some Swiss Cake Roll foreplay.
Read the rest of this entry »

Shrug.

I’ve always gotten Fielder and Kinsler confused anyway. Seven letters in their last names. Both getting paid millions of dollars to play baseball. Okay, one of them can’t grow facial hair and the other one has a neck tattoo, but can anyone really keep the two of them straight? Physically, I mean. If you described each one to a police sketch artist, they’d end up looking like twins. Also, statistically. They both hit like thirty doubles a year. And that’s just the start of their similarities. (And the end.) Their Bill James Similarity Score must be like 950. (Or 50.)

So it’s just two more interchangeable parts being swapped for each other. The fans won’t even notice a difference on the field, and it doesn’t do anything to help fix up the Obamacare website. I don’t have time to worry about Ian Fielder and Prince Kinsler. I’ve been trying to buy health insurance for almost two months.

Prince Fielder doesn’t call the wrong number. You answer the wrong phone.

Jeff Passan of Yahoo has submitted a science hypothesis to the teeming masses by way of media sociale, as follows:

You could substitute Alex Rodriguez's name for Lance Armstrong and pretty much everything would be the same.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 20, 2013

Perhaps? Perhaps. Ultimately, this isn’t the point. For, whatever the virtues of Passan’s suggestion, chief among them is how readily it (i.e. that suggestion) lends itself to the nearly effortless production of weblog content.

Read the rest of this entry »

A story that broke today was, like so many stories during the early off-season, about a young songstress from New Zealand and George Brett. As it happens, the title of the very popular Lorde song Royals was inspired by a picture of none other than the Hall-of-Famer for Kansas City. This is, indeed, crack reporting. What isn’t crack reporting is creating a list of songs that were certainly NOT inspired by George Brett. That is what I have done. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Hall of Fame’s class of 2013 has been revealed, and I can’t pretend to be thrilled about it. No, I’m not talking about the Baseball Hall of Fame; it’s November, and baseball is dead to me. I’m talking of course about the National Toy Hall of Fame, which, for the woefully ignorant among you, is based in the Strong Museum of Play (that’s its name) in Rochester, New York. Faced with a solid pool of nominees, the voters once again displayed a truly breathtaking lack of boldness, imagination, and critical thinking, electing only two mediocre candidates — Chess and Rubber Duck — and thus ushering the Hall further down the road to complete irrelevancy.

Read the rest of this entry »