truly embody my spirt
spirt (spûrt) n.
1. A secret weiner.
This reminds me of one of my favorite games: what do you like for your stadium/ring/batter-up entry theme?
2: "(They Call Me) Dr. Love" - KISS
Especially if you danced like that from the batter's circle to home plate.
The last time I was involved with this, someone named some piece from some opera, and I thought it was a good idea. But now I've forgotten both the piece and opera.
Ben w-lfs-n's would be Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand (1.000).
I wish I could be Meat Loaf, just for one day. Just for one concert, really.
Wow, I get two theme songs from Charley!
Anybody know what this "Crazy Fingers" song is?
Clean Steve, by R. Hitchcock.
And/or, Ballad of a Thin Man, by R. Dylan.
All of you are going to strike out.
Thanks for the link, apo. I'm not entirely sure that's it, though, since googling revealed a band named "crazy fingers" with a track named "ballerina."
My theme song for myself is something from Threepenny Opera. Maybe the Cannon Song would be good for my ballpark music.
Maybe, but Crazy Fingers is a Dead tribute band, so...
If the title Psycho Killer were more descriptive of the song's sound, I'd certainly choose it. As it is, I still do, but with some qualms.
I've always wanted to vote for a candidate who used 'Peter Pumpkinhead' as a campaign song, but the blasphemy issues make that unlikely.
16: I suspect that Crazy Fingers' "Ballerina" is a cover of the Van Morrison song. Which makes me wonder why you'd cite the tribute band version.
Though he did say it was a complicated link.
Jackm is referring to the linked post, in which CharleyCarp free-associates from her to "Crazy Fingers" through "Ballerina." My guess is that CC is/was a big enough Dead fan that songs he mentions are to be considered Dead songs unless you have positive evidence otherwise.
I don't know any of the songs, and of the bands, I only know a bit of the Dead, so I was just trying to figure out CC's reference....
(Yeah, I know. My excuse is that I grew up in Berkeley, which shut down for a week when Jerry died. Literally, we had mourning hippies accosting strangers on the street to talk about where they were when they first heard. I was too intolerant to listen to any music produced between 1940 and 1975 until I was in my mid-twenties. )
Eh, pls disregard 22.
JM, are you making excuses for not knowing the Dead? You don't have to make excuses for not knowing the Dead. In fact, since you grew up in Berkeley, that makes you a True Hero. (N.B. Workingman's and like that are pretty decent.)
C'mon, if you're entering the ring, you totally want something hard.
From the 30 seconds I've spent on this, I'm saying "Battery" by Metallica. Or if I really want to freak people the fuck out, Slayer's "Dead Skin Mask."
Okay, googling tells me that the Dead did indeed cover VM's "Ballerina," so I'm sticking with my original interpretation.
In my experience, the Dead were pretty amazing if you were seeing them live while on psychedelics. If you weren't, though, they were just a bunch of old guys playing songs you'd heard a million times before. shrug.
At gunpoint I could probably fish up the melody line of that song that has "living on Reds, Vitimin-C, and cocaine,/All I can say is tum-tee-dum a shame." But that's about it.
No, I think I'm apologizing for not knowing Van Morrison, who, according to some poetry geeks I know, has Very Meaningful Lyrics. If ordered to sing something of his at gunpoint, I would just accept death.
You don't have to die, J-Mo! "Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la la-la, la-la-ti-da" is a valid VM lyric.
You couldn't sing "Brown-eyed Girl"?
Ah, yes, I could sing "Brown-Eyed Girl"--if and only if my gun-wielding captors reminded me that was an option.
But in my rendition, it would go:
Oooo, oooo, brown-eyed girl!
Too tiddly um um, brown-eyed girl!
Oooo, oooo, brown-eyed girl!
Too tiddly um um, brown-eyed girl!
Oooo, oooo, brown-eyed girl!
Too tiddly um um, brown-eyed girl!
Until I died.
Um. Yeah, I think that's apology-worthy. This is a beautiful essay though I don't know that I would sit around reading the Lyrics in a book.
Could you sing "G-L-O-R-I-A"?
What I'm saying is, lyrics shmyrics. If it's good enough for Bill Clinton, tum tum tiddly um tum.
32 -- Pooh Bear oughta sue for plagiarism.
33.--Not unless "Gloria" is followed with "in excelsis Deo," no.
The essential ingredient in the game -- the central rule -- is that the selection of songs must depend completely on a full iPod shuffle. The song has to play to be assigned. No fair just picking one. See I was thinking about whether You Don't Pull No Punches would be right for LB, but it didn't play, and I didn't have to think about it. I'm really not sure whether 'William Blake and the Eternals, standing with the Sisters of Mercy, looking for the Veedon Fleece' could have been made to fit. 'Going down to the West Coast and shine our light into the day of bloomin' wonder' -- that's not exactly Brooks Brothers either.
Tia: I would say that all those adjectives apply to this version of 'I Know My Love.' The version I have is from the Chieftains' compilation The Wide World Over (a phrase from IKML) and originally appeared on their album Tears of Stone. As for Across the Board, I didn't mean you specifically. It's on the Baron von Toolbooth album, which earned this line from an Amazon reviewer: "'Across the Board' must be the most pornographic song to date (1980). Grace sings every descriptive phase with passion - and you can bet that she means it."
Not worksafe, to be sure.
Jack: It was the Grateful Dead version of Crazy Fingers from the Blues for Allah record. Maybe even more music than words on this one, although several phrases didn't seem all out of range. 'Ballerina' is a song by Van Morrison, from the Astral Weeks record. If you tell me you don't know this record, I'll spend the rest of the day grumbling about the youth of today. Hell in a handbasket, I tell you, hell in a handbasket.
I'd say Mastodon's "Blood and Thunder" for lines like "No man of the flesh can ever stop me", but most of the lyrics are tied a little too close to the Moby Dick theme. So maybe I'll just go with "Angel of Death": after all, it is National Day of Slayer (sound on that page).
Well, at least I'm staying off your lawn?
Don't know about lyrics but my current fave song title is Polar Bear's "Heavy Paws on the Powdery Floor".
Polar Bear, btw, are amazing.
In my experience, the Dead were pretty amazing if you were seeing them live while on psychedelics. If you weren't, though, they were just a bunch of old guys playing songs you'd heard a million times before. shrug.
In my experience, John Oswald's Grayfolded is pretty cool.
Hell in a handbasket, I tell you, hell in a handbasket.
You mean the Stan Ridgway song?
I write slow, and had not seen anything from 20 on when writing 37. Jack, I hold it against no one uder 40 that they are unfamiliar with the Dead canon. The point of the recorded music, it always seemed to me, was just to remember the experience of attending the concert. This is why nearly all the GD on my iPod is either from concerts I went to, or records I had in high school.
Van Morrison's output is far to extensive to make a generalization about significant poetry.
If, on 6/6/06, SUNN0))) were playing as I approached the batter's box, and simultaneously the sun eclipsed and defensive players started bleeding from their ears, nose, and eyesockets, I would take it as a sign that the time had finally come for me to hit a curve ball.
I went to a Dead concert once. It was fun, in an "omg, it really is what you'd think it would be like" sort of way. I drank a fifth of Jack Daniels, since I'm square about drug use, and then drove an hour and a half to get home. That's probably about the extent of my youthful stupidity. Woot.
If, on 6/6/06, SUNN0))) were playing as I approached the batter's box,
You must walk to the batter's box reaaaaal slow.
the time had finally come for me to hit a curve ball
Does one properly speak of "hitting" a curve ball? I have heard people talk about "throwing" a curve ball and I guess that's what you would be doing if you hit the curve ball once thrown; but I would probably speak just of "hitting the ball" -- since it's being a "curve" ball has nothing to do with any intention of the batter.
You don't watch much baseball, do you?
47: As I understand it (I hate baseball), hitting a curveball is more difficult because hitters make decisions about where and when to hit as the ball approaches the plate. If you can't see a curve or adjust to the curve, you're a relatively easy out.
Perhaps he means it not as a decision he would make, but as an inevitability.
Man, you guys are commies. Take two doses of The Natural, one Field of Dreams and one Eight Men Out and then we can talk.
Baseball is dull as shit, and the whole "baseball = America" meme is even duller. But it's not that hard to realize that hitting something that isn't making a straight line in the air would be a difficult thing to do.
Man, you guys are commies. Take two doses of The Natural, one Field of Dreams and one Eight Men Out and then we can talk.
Then we'll be comatose, you mean.
Baseball is a game built by fat drunks that mythologizes fat drunks and that is sold to fat drunks. But to each his own.
48 -- No.
51 -- Oh ok, I could dig that.
55 -- but then why am I not more into it?
Without addressing the "Baseball bad!" madness,
33: Isn't that properly a Them song?
38: Isn't that the one about Eichmann?
38: Isn't that the one about Eichmann?
Gosh, I hope not. I've never really listened to Slayer lyrics. (Except for CRIMINALLY! INSANE!, but that's kind of hard to miss.)
I've never really listened to Slayer by choice, but a friend of mine in undergrad really liked them, and I believe that's what he said about that song.
I don't know whether any of you Communists ever actually played baseball, but my heart broke the first time I faced down a breaking pitch. Just couldn't hit it. Before sophomore year a few pitchers in my district were able to put a little tug into the pitch, but it seems as if after that summer a large minority could throw an honest-to-god breaker.
Wikipedia says Mengele. The first line seems to be "Auschwitz, the meaning of pain," so, well.
(I am not taking any guff from basketball fans.)
There is one true sport, and only one true sport, and David Stern is its prophet. When the rest of you sober up, you'll realize that.
I don't much care for baseball either, but a 90mph pitch takes about half a second to travel from the pitcher's hand to home plate, meaning a batter has to start his swing practically the instant it leaves the pitcher's hand. Trying to hit a breaking ball is way, way more difficult. Inability to hit a curve was pretty much what deep-sixed Michael Jordan's baseball career.
Sorry for weird tense in 61. Painful memory.
Another way in which MJ and I are eerily similar.
I was propelled along by my dad's love of the game. Not that he forced me or anything, but it meant a lot to him, and he could show me and tell me things. He must have been in his sixties when he last showed me a pitch. I'm not good, wasn't in practice, and couldn't hang on to it, but I could see the break. What is now called a slider he called a drop.
I suspected it extended beyond the underwear ads, Smasher.
Oh, and Tia, it's the tone and the delivery, not the words themselves. Mostly.
SCMT, you saying fat drunks should have a game?
shouldn't
Damn. better just get off the internets right now before it gets any worse.
Being able to hit a baseball has nothing whatsoever to do with appreciating the game. I'm scared of softballs, and yet an A's game on the radio means all is well in the world.
I was getting to be a big fan of baseball in the late 80s - oddly, though the A's were more local I was a fan of the Giants - but when the earthquake hit in 89 I stopped watching the World Series, sort of watched the next couple of seasons, and then stopped. I've only watched the playoffs, inconsistently, since then.
And the DH is a crime against American values.
I had a decent arm when I played baseball, but I wasn't good enough to pitch, so they had me at catcher. I could pick off base-stealers pretty well, but people charging for home plate made for interesting experiences. I was really scrawny back in middle school/early high school when I was playing (didn't get even the small bulk I have now until college), so I got bowled over a lot. Once some of the other guys started getting decently big, I switched to track, which was more suitable to my build.
I can't admit when I became a Baseball fan. The accusations of fair-weatherness would overwhelm me.
the DH is a crime against American values.
The man speaks the truth. We shouldn't be mollycoddling people who never learned how to play offense.
I can't admit when I became a Baseball fan.
Let me know when you feel up to moving from loving a game to loving a sport.
75: Don't tell me when the Sox won. Sigh. Fair-weather indeed.
Tell them to get in their automatic transmission trucks and go away.
eb, are you telling me you didn't even watch the end of the historic A's-Giants World Series? The Battle of the Bay? Yeah, that quake was bad, but, c'mon!
Since when am I a Bostonian? It was certainly not then.
Timmy, I have been in the past, and may be again, a devoted Knicks fan. I have a small scar on one hand from jumping up in the air following a particular Knicks victory over the bulls, cut it on the ceiling. But then I didn't live in New York for four years, and when I came back they were too depressing to follow, I can barely read recaps of their games, let alone watch them.
I began paying less attention to baseball after the 1981 strike and stopped paying attention altogether after the '94 strike. Alternatively, I only began paying any attention to hockey when we the Whalers moved down here and became the Hurricanes.
My ex-wife grew up on hockey (both her brothers played at the collegiate level) and she has had season tickets to the Hurricanes' games for the last four years. So, our son has been at all the playoff games in Raleigh this year, which have included some real corkers like last night.
w/d, the Mets are supposed to suck. That's why going to their games is fun. Of course, the franchise owners are betraying that great lineage by trying to make the team good right now, which has made me look into maybe getting out to some minor league games this summer...
Wait, you're not saying you're a Yankees fan, are you?
I watched the pre-quake games but nothing after. I still remember waiting for game three to start, hearing some car or house alarms go off, and then finally feeling the ground shaking. A single book fell from a shelf in the room next to where I was.
One need not be a Bostonian to be a Sox fan. Myself, for example, though I am several years lapsed at this point. I actually willl likely be casting my lot in with the Nationals, now that I am a newly-minted official D.C. resident.
I can remember being a bit amused, but also somewhat admiring, as Johnny Bench turned into an on-the-scene disaster reporter.
84: I'm not saying that, but I just failed to find an old comment where I did say it. Also, the year I didn't want to say in 76 is 1996.
Though this year, I've been to two Mets games and only one Yankees.
There is one true sport, and only one true sport, and David Stern is its prophet.
What position is he? Linebacker? Safety?
Yankees fans don't like baseball, they like winning.
It's going to be some time before you can reasonably feel good about the Knicks, w/d. I don't really need to tell you that, but it's fun to say it anyway.
91 gets it so excruciatingly right.
91: Ben, why do you insist on making Ogged's cancer worse?
92: It's a good year to be a Texas sports fan, eh, Smasher? Peter King even has the Cowboys in the Superbowl.
88 - Did you get the cool new ISE page? Or the old lame one? I suspect the old lame one because I'm beginning to think the .htaccess they let us edit is just pretend.
91: I might bother to expalin why that's wrong if it was said by someone who believed it.
92: But I really should watch them more often anyway.
97: Nah, I found that one, the comment I was thinking of might not exist, or may be on a different blog.
96 -- way cool! I got an ISE earlier this afternoon but was not redirected to the kitty page. Alack, a day.
I love the kitty! Now I will begin hoping for errors!
96: No, I got the old one. Sadly, it seems. That new one is all sorts of awesome.
95: Yep. A good time to start printing the "My Boss Is a German Power Forward" shwag, which I'm thinking will go over pretty well in Texas. If only Houston had signed Vince!
100 - I'm so annoyed that isn't working. I'd rather see "Unfogged Happy Fun Page" than a nasty internal server error.
88 - Did you get the cool new ISE page? Or the old lame one? I suspect the old lame one because I'm beginning to think the .htaccess they let us edit is just pretend.
It works, just in limited circumstances. Specifically I think the reason it's not working here is that it's per-directory and the 500 error is being generated not from a different place (/usr/www/cgi-bin). So if, for example, we had:
RewriteRule ^foo$ /index.html
that would, as I've confirmed, cause unfogged.com/foo to go to index.html. But it's certainly true that the .htaccess we can access is fucking crippled. Fuck Pair with a thorny shrub, that's what I say.
I just sent you an email about that, Ben, and a possible solution. Lemme know.
My Boss Is a German Power Forward
You work for the Detlef Schrempf Foundation?
Baseball always strikes me as an impossibly tedious game and it's one of those things that puts me off a lot of supposedly 'great' American novels even if I like many other things about them. Too much bloody baseball. If I had a pound for every novel that featured some tedious baseball metaphor...
Football, which is arguably a game just as central, if not more so, to British culture features far less as a trope in British literary novels.
Baseball always strikes me as an impossibly tedious game
Foreigners aren't supposed to get it.
Actually I think the equivalent stumbling block in British literature would be the C of E. Many a minute have I spent trying to what Barbara Pym is talking about when she's talking about Catholic Privileges.
Baseball is really tedious. It is too long and there isn't enough movement. It really blunts the effectiveness of Jim Rome type criticisms of soccer when a baseball game is much harder to sit through.
Well, the C of E thing would be an English rather than British literature thing. The C of E not really being a big thing in Scotland.
We have sectarianism, though. Catholicism versus presbyterianism would be the Scottish equivalent as a literary subject.
Who criticizes soccer? Soccer is teh best. Stuff is going on, and the guys are hot. What's not to like?
Cricket is English and largely rural. It's really not a big subject in British fiction at all. It's pretty tedious though.
there isn't enough movement.
There's endless movement, you just have to know what to watch. The players in the field constantly change position and more important, the ball moves constantly between the pitcher and the catcher.
In other words, you have to know how to, and want to, watch defense.
Baseball is an all right game. It is much better than British football and is the only American sport that is remotely tolerable. It lacks the subtlety of cricket because there is much less tactics in the field placement, but it is a good sport. It also shares the advantage with cricket that you can get fucking blind drunk while watching it. I don't think I've ever been as drunk in my life as I once was on a bankers' freebie to the Boston Bostons versus the New York Immigrants or whatever they're called.
the Boston Bostons versus the New York Immigrants
Okay, that was actually funny. Not as funny as a game with "off stump" and "silly point", but still.
In other words, you have to know how to, and want to, watch defense.
You're not actually defending baseball, are you, slol?
You're not actually defending baseball
Baseball doesn't need me to defend it. I'm just explaining it.
115: Indeed, not to mention the pitcher scratching his nuts, or whatever.
not to mention the pitcher scratching his nuts
You watch what you like, and I'll watch what I like.
Baseball is general in the northern part of the Western hemisphere, we all know about the central American and Caribean players, but baseball is and always has been big in Canada, too. I actually played more football and hockey, but find baseball a comfortable presence and reference place. The term pastime probably captures that best.
122: Professional basketball is the sporting equivalent of freedom and democracy. No two countries that each have professional basketball teams have ever gone to war. Everyone has an inborn love of the NBA, and it is only the soft bigotry of low expectations that claims that some people cannot or will not learn to love it.
Everyone has an inborn love of the NBA
Can't stand it. Mine must have been drummed out of me.
I'm watching the Yankees - Red Sox right now. Damon got on with a bunt, and Cabrera hit into a double play. First inning. Anyone who finds this boring must have ADD.
Or not be either fat enough or drunk enough.
Let me step in and offer the third way for the purple sports fan—you can do both! In just a few games, the Mavs will knock out the Heat, and I'll celebrate by going to Nats games all summer. There's no reason to make this needlessly complicated.
But soccer, so far as I can tell, is anarchy.
NBA is teh suck. Unfogged is all about Mom, Freedom, and Apple Pie. You can take your NBA lovin' over to Yglesias's blog with the rest of the traitors.
(It should be noted that just as I tried to post this Defense of the True American Sport, the site came under a crippling spam attack. See the lengths these infidels will go to suppress the truth!)
Watching the White Sox game with my uncle while sipping pints in an Irish pub on Chicago's (very) south side was the highlight of my weekend.
128 to 124
And the fact that I'm trash-talking about stuff I could give a damn about should show you the extent of my procrastination right now.
Damon got on with a bunt, and Cabrera hit into a double play.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Baseball encapsulates all the best qualities of America; basketball, all the worst.
(Actually, I do know the problem. You'll get one if you try to comment when we're getting hit by those spammers. We appear to be in the midst of a wave right now.)
Allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste...
Spaaaaaaam waaaaaaave!
(The robots don't get the kittens, do they? Give them the goatze.)
Baseball encapsulates all the best qualities of America; basketball, all the worst.
Yes, it's all been downhill since Brown vs. Board of Education, hasn't it.
Uh, Tim? Jackie Robinson played with the Dodgers starting in 1947, seven years before Brown. Admittedly, pro basketball was integrated a few years earlier. But baseball is not exactly for Whitey Only. Nor is cricket.
I really thought Brown should have won it in 4, but that deliberate speed strategy forced the series to go all 7.
Board of Education, as might be expected, controlled the paint.
Whitey made a very strong showing in the rematch.
I think these defenses, while heartfelt and true, are maybe too solemn. Baseball is a wonderful warm-weather bear-drinking occasion. Less expensive, less time consuming, more intimate and a lot less noisy than NASCAR, its only competitor for broad-based summer festive. Also takes place, in its major league variety, in cities, while the parking and noise demands of NASCAR require exurbia. If they ever succeed in building the long-desired track in Nassau County, you might be able to hear it in Brooklyn.
I am no longer the most hated person in my apartment building. I just went down to give something to Mark and have a feeling his continued earth-shattering screams of SUCK MY ASS, MANNY RAMIREZ!!!1! make him a strong contender.
I've always wanted to vote for a candidate who used 'Peter Pumpkinhead'
Hooray!
Baseball is a better sport on the radio than it is live. Unless you're drinking beer, but you can drink beer at football games, too (or before them, if it's NCAA), and the game actually is exciting.
Becks, I love your overheard in NY stories.
a wonderful warm-weather bear-drinking occasion
Hardcore, man. Hardcore.
the game actually is exciting
[incredulous] Wait... you're referring to football here?
147: Really, the similarities are remarkable.
Yes, TMK. If you think football sucks, y'know, start following a good team. [raspberry]
Jackmormon, are you a Mets fan?!
You'd probably also like Keyspan--a much nicer ballpark than Shea, which really is kind of a dump.
Don't worry, they'll fold this year. They don't have the starters. Glavine's old, Pedro's both old and delicate, no one else is really all that good.
I've been easier on Yankees fans since I've gottten to know two who also root for the ever-pathetic Jets, and since they booed Dick Cheney DURING GOD BLESS AMERICA.
"Easier" only means I make specific, individual exceptions to 91. In general it's completely right.
I said this before, but let be clear about my take on 91. As far as I know, w-lfs-n has less interest in sports, including baseball, than I do in yak herding. I therefore can't imagine that he has sincerely formed any opinion on the Yankees, or their fans.
I have also previously promised that if the Mets team plane crashes, I'll have a party. Though I hope David Wright (will end up being at least a top 20 all time 3B), Pedro (is no worse than the sixth best pticher in history), and the sidearmer who was on the A's when Moneyball was written (people who throw at interesting angles are interesting) all live. And Willie Randolph.
I said this before, but let be clear about my take on 91. As far as I know, w-lfs-n has less interest in sports, including baseball, than I do in yak herding.
Maybe I don't know much about baseball. But purloined that observation from a professor of mine who not only knew the baseball rulebook more or less inside out, but was also a fan of the game itself. And I believe it perfervidly.
But purloined
I purloined. I did. Me.
If I said "fans of Jazzkammer don't like music, they like eating puppies raw" and then added that while I have no idea who or what Jazzkammer is, someone who does relayed the information in the above quote to me, and is a big fan of their genre, why would you give any credence to it? It's a mal-formed preference.
I know what baseball is. I've seen—and played in—baseball games.
You, sir, are no baseball game.
I give it credence because I independently know it to be true.
I don't wish death on Yankees, just severe public embarrassment.
158: What have you done with my claret?
160: Rather than play with the facts I've made up in 159 in to make them closer to the relationship between you and baseball, let me say this: I never said word one about your knowledge of baseball, I said things about your level of interest in it, how much you care about it. That's where I suggest the problem lies. Since 159 didn't quite get at this, but could be re-jiggered to do so, it's somewhat inapt.
158: What have you done with my claret?
Artlessly spilled it on Tia.
Here's three (compund) claims someone could make:
1) I hate the Yankees, they're an evil team.
2) The Yankees have so much money that they can sign people to idiotic deals, ruin their farm system, and make bad trades without having to pay for their mistakes. For gods sake, Bernie Williams should not have been a CF for at least three years, and yet hasn't seriously hurt them. They have Kevin Brown on their payroll!
3) Yankee fans don't like baseball, they like winning.
My response to 1, or variants thereof, is basically to cheer louder. 2, or variants of that, can lead to a reasoned argument. I agree with the version of 2 I wrote, but wouldn't agree with some other claims about the structure of team. But with 3, all I can do is either assume people don't mean it, and are just trying to annoy Yankees fans or that they like saying false things for some other reason. Unless 3 is, despite appearing to be universally quantified, existentially quantified. In which case it's true.
Can't we all just get along, hold hands, and solemnly proclaim that Duke sucks?
okay, I don't actually know what "existentially quantified" means, but I explicitly said it wasn't universal. See above--anyone who roots for the Jets clearly doesn't just "like winning".
If you want to universalize it, it's not so much that Yankee fans don't like baseball and only like winning, as that the experience of rooting for them seems so different from rooting for other teams that it's barely the same game....
Yankee fans don't write stuff like this. They write stuff like this.
Elsewhere, Gould has been less well served by the editors of this volume. Too much of the material is repetitive, and it is not just the endlessly reiterated glory of Joe DiMaggio that palls. There is also too much pompous phraseology, exaggerated emotion, and general striving for significance. Gould knows all this is a constant temptation for baseball writers, but he can't seem to help himself. As he says, 'the silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence and so on.' Yet he is also capable of writing, about a piece of turf from the old Brooklyn Dodgers stadium at Ebbets Field on display as part of an exhibition of baseball memorabilia at the American Museum of Natural History: 'We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow such ground. Robbie did, and Campy, and Duke, and PeeWee, and also the Preacher.'
re: 169
Now there's a classic piece of overblown baseball writing. Joe DiMaggio, pah...
However, if it was this guy, I'd be cranking out the hackneyed superlatives too...
I explicitly said it wasn't universal
Yes, but while I started talking about this again after you cited 91 as, with few exceptions generally completely right; it was the author of 91 with whom I was taking issue.
I agree in part that rooting for the Yankees is different. But, let's assume that one really cares about who wins and loses each game, not just the season outcome. Then, baseball has a ton of games per season, the team with the best regular season record in history lost 46 games, and that was off the charts. Losing 60 is usually good for 1st place.
Hey it just occurred to me on the elevator, what song I want to have playing when I go onstage ATM: Ted, Woody and Junior. (Reckon I would be a better stripper than batter.)
A-and also: if any NYC-area Mineshaft denizens are interested in meeting up next Thursday evening (6-8) I was alerted by my good friend Bill to an upcoming event at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park South: His friend Kennedy Moore of AskANewYorker.com is unveiling a series of video profiles of New Yorkers. Should be fun, National Arts Club is supposed to be a pretty spectacular space. I will be there with two female companions.
I'm a transplanted A's fan, Katherine. Structurally, it would make sense for me to be a Mets fan, and besides, my mother would have a stroke if I supported the Yankees. Shea is fun--I like booing everything from the Canadian anthem to the ump to my own team players. And I can also afford tickets below 1000 ft. I can't get behind Yankee Stadium's "no beer in the bleachers" rule, if I can't afford to get out of the bleachers, now can I?
Wait...Yglesias is getting paid to basketblog now? That's awesome.
Wow. It would be more impressive, of course, if Slate's sports articles weren't uniformly bad.
I don't know how you can write an article like that without mentioning Finley.
