Serenade to the Mitchell Report

I'd just like to give a shout-out to the following baseball players:

Barry Bonds Jason Grimsley David Segui Paul Lo Duca Mo Vaughn Denny Neagle Lenny Dykstra Jason Giambi Jeremy Giambi Roger Clemens Andy Pettite David Justice Miguel Tejada Rafael Palmiero Larry Bigbie

Matt Franco Rondell White Chuck Knoblauch Todd Pratt Mike Stanton Kevin Brown Eric Gagne Rick Ankiel Paul Byrd Brendan Donnelly Jose Canseco Troy Glaus Scott Schoenweis Matt Williams ... etc., ad nauseum

... You guys suck! Fuck you guys!

Stuff, Things

I had a dream last night that I was riding in the casual carpool (a really good system we have here in Gomorrah-by-the-Bay which allows the drivers to save on toll money and skip the ugly toll plaza traffic, and the riders to avoid riding on the grungy odor-trap known as BART), but my dad was driving. I was in the back, and Carlos Beltran was in the front passenger seat, in his full Mets uniform and batting helmet. We must've made a wrong turn somewhere, because I didn't recognize where we were. I kept offering suggestions to my dad to get us back on track, but they were apparently all wrong, because pretty soon I realized we were on a narrow dirt road in the mountains.

I was really embarrassed, so I started making conversation with Carlos, like, "So, congratulations on the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards--that must be exciting..." but he was giving short answers and was obviously annoyed that we were lost in the wilderness when all he was trying to do was get to work. Then I somehow said, "so I guess this means you're the best first baseman in the league..." and he snapped, "First base?!" (since of course he's a center fielder, which I knew, but I was nervous and misspoke, so get off my back, OK?). Anyway, we continued to get more and more lost, but eventually I woke up. For all I know we're still there, and have had to eat Carlos to survive.

Meanwhile, here are some bits I've written in the past weeks which you should check out if you are the sort of person who enjoys things which are funny:

• Jude Is Never Having to Say You're Sorry: According to Jude Law, the only thing we have to regret is regret itself.


• Cracked Science Corner!!!!11!!: Three morsels of sciencey goodness, each of vital importance to you and your increasingly bleak prospects for a future as a non-dead person.


• And He Saw That They Were Good: Salma Hayek sez "Thank God for My Breasts!"


• Beatleohead, R.I.P.: Thom Yorke tells Paul McCartney to go suck a walrus.

...oh, and a Happy Turkey Day to all!

Wait 'Til Next #$%@!

As my significant other said, "Well, now you can focus your attention on other things. Like what to buy me for Christmas."

Well put.

LOLmets

Laughing to keep from crying, really.

Handy Phrases to Use After Your Team Is Eliminated from the Playoffs

• Uhghahhhn.
  
  
• You God damn, damn God-damnin' God-damners... damn.
  
  
• Do not want
  
  
• Guhh-ahrrrghhmm. Llngm.
  
  
• [Opposing team's starting pitcher] is the bastard inbred son of a motherless goat-whore!
  
  
• Finally I can change my lucky [team colors] [hat/watch/underwear/adult diaper]!
  
  
• Wwwww...
  
  
• [Underperforming millionaire outfielder] licks the sweat off a dead bastard inbred son of a motherless goat-whore's balls!
  
  
• [Long pause.] Mmmnghl.
  
  
• It is only through the experience of loss that we may truly learn to appreciate the beauty of the struggle, the adversity, and the journey which make up the true lessons of this game—which is, in the end, no more, nor less, than the game of life and FUCK YOU ST. LOUIS!!!!
  
  
• [Sobbing wordlessly.]
  
  
• As an intellectual, I have greater concerns than the performance of a bunch of overpaid growth-hormone abusers in a staged contest of athleticism, and I therefore oh God you bastards you broke my Goddam heart you sons-of-bitches...
  
  
• Wait... Tih... Nexhhh... Yeahhhhhrmrmmgh...

Take Me Out to the WULAD

Don't get me wrong, I'm as thrilled as the next fan that the Mets won their first division title since 1988—I just think the celebration got a little out of hand.

Take Me Out to the God Game

In June, USA Today ran a story in which the Colorado Rockies were described as the most Christian baseball team in the major leagues, with prayer meetings, bans on pornography and swearing in the clubhouse, and "a Christian-based code of conduct they believe will bring them focus and success."

"You look at things that have happened to us this year," [General Manager Dan] O'Dowd says. "You look at some of the moves we made and didn't make. You look at some of the games we're winning. Those aren't just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this."

But the Rockies may want to look into whether other deities may be available, since apparently the best the Lord of All Creation is capable of in this day and age is a 55-58 record and 4th place in the National League West, the weakest division in baseball. Hosanna!

Stuff, Things

I know I said that The Bible II: Heretic Boogaloo would be comin' at you live at a rate of one chapter per week: what you've got to understand about that, however, is that I was totally lying. Nevertheless, it will come, though you may have to fidget in expectation for a bit between installments. (Sounds like my college years!)

In other news, ever since I've been slacking at this website, the Mets have been rocking like a hurricane. Which means that any attempt by me to update more frequently could be catastrophic to a team whose fans have suffered much in the past. (And last I checked, there's no "WULAD" in "team.")

But for the time being, expect our crack editorial staff to keep up the same rate of two pretty-okay posts per week, which, considering the thousands of man-hours the WULAD Wreadership spend elsewhere, should be plenty 'nuff to keep you going until the Mets start losing or I get fired or both.

In further other news, here is a sign I recently saw on an airplane which made me think I was becoming dyslexic:



... alternate explanations? Spit 'em out.

News & Views & Jews & Gnus

I know what you're thinking. WULAD sucks is what you're thinking. And you're right. However, no criticism you could dish out could be worse than the tons of self-flagellation the intrepid WULAD staff dumps upon its own head on a daily basis. (I know, "dumps flagellation"? Pick a metaphor, right? This is exactly what I'm talking about, people.) So save your critiques for someone who'll really respond and adapt, like the president.

Meanwhile, another one bites the dust. Those of us who have been standing on the edge of the digital precipice really should've gotten organized, and we could've put together some sort of impressive group-blog-suicide, and you all would've been really sorry that you didn't treat us better when you had the chance. Instead, I'm left to soldier on ever more intermittently, whilst young whippersnappers who post ten times a day about hip indie bands like Foreigner and the contents of Bob Saget's stomach drown in easy money and women and snort lines off of Donal Logue's hairy chest. (Cocaine or chest-hair dandruff? You tell me.) Well that's not for me, suckers.

So on to new business. The Bible sequel. Well, I guess that's old business. Anyway, I've been putting it off, even though I got some outstanding submissions, because I was hoping to fill it out with some WULAD-spun brilliance. But the longer I wait, the better I feel it has to be, and before you know it we'll all be underwater, and you'll all be calling me on your brain-phones wondering where the Bible sequel and the dry land are. And I won't have any answers for you. Unless you're willing to barter with ammunition, beef jerky, life preservers, or rumors about the whereabouts of Paris Hilton's Ark, that is. (And don't think I'm afraid of your little floating armored Prius, either.)

In any case, what's really important is that the Mets took two of three from the Yankees this weekend, which tells me that God has finally stopped smiling down on the Bronx Bombers, and is instead preparing to unleash His wrath upon the tower of Babylonian hubris that is New York's American League franchise. And I will enjoy watching it fall, and the subsequent sight of Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera and Hideki Matsui trying to speak to each other in their now-incomprehensible languages. Wait--I think it's started already.

So that's all for now, but just remember: I never said that Karl Rove was going to be indicted.

I'm Not Dead!

That's the good news. The bad news is that I am dead. Ha! Got you! I'm not really dead. Yet.

In lieu of the promised Bible sequel, which is still in the works (hint, hint, submitters), I'd like to offer a few succinct thoughts on events in the news, which although lame and unfunny are nevertheless all you're going to get for the time being. Here we go!

• The Immigration Debate: What we're witnessing now is really only the latest incarnation of a long-standing trend. I lay the blame for this crisis on the criminals who started this whole immigration business--I'm referring, of course, to the so-called "Native" Americans, who were really Asians who decided to sneak over some land bridge 10,000 to 30,000 years ago (when the INS was woefully underfunded) in an attempt to steal jobs from decent, hardworking saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, and various other All-American megafauna. So when your children are forced to sing the Star-Spangled Banner in Esperanto, you can all thank Chief Paleolithic-Land-Bridge-Walker-Over. Speaking of ancient mammals...
  
  
• Bloggers Who Quit and Move to Peru: All I have to say about this development is that you should never start a blog unless you're willing to continue posting three or four times a day for the rest of your natural life. Quitters never win, and winners never quit and move to South America. It's that simple. In any case, say hi to Hitler and Tupac for me, you comment-disabling sumbitch. Speaking of sumbitches...
  
  
• The Colbert Controversy: In case you haven't heard, some jerk wasted an opportunity to address some of our nation's most powerful movers and shakers, instead choosing to take cheap potshots at a beleagured figurehead who wants nothing more than to do God's work and be left alone with his ranch and nuclear bombs. My feeling is that the Spoonbender should never have badmouthed Patton Oswalt like that. Speaking of nuclear bombs...
  
  
• The Ahmadinejad Communiqué: Was going to be the name of my spy thriller. You bastards. Speaking of thrillers...
  
  
• The Mets Are in First Place: And my jock strap shall be neither washed nor removed as long as they maintain this position in the standings. Finally, speaking of unwashed jockstraps...
  
  
• Thanks for reading!

WULAD's Baseball Preview 2006!

Ah, April--when the cold, hard, molasses-filled ground of winter, with its useless sports such as curling, ice badminton, extreme ice badminton, and football, give way to the green fields of spring, and the return of “America’s Game”: Grand Theft Auto 4. And also, there’s baseball.

That’s right, baseball--with its nostalgically lazy pacing, its nostalgia-laden walks down the memory lanes of Small Town, U.S.A., where the nostalgia is so thick that you could cut it thickly and nostalgically with a magical nostalgia-knife, and weep with nostalgia as you bite into your juicy slice of nostalgia, and feel your tears of nostalgia slowly turn to sorrow as you realize that the slice cost eight dollars and it has a hair in it.

Well, friend--and note that I said “friend” and not “friends,” since I’m realistic about this site’s readership--you’ve come to the right place for all your baseball-addressing needs. We here at WULAD are perennial fans of the National Pastime--again, I’m talking about Grand Auto Theft 4, but we also enjoy baseball, so here, in handy itemized format, is an exclusive look at what's in store for this glorious game and also baseball in 2006...

• Japanese players returning to their American teams following their win in the inaugural World Baseball Classic will endlessly mock and berate their non-Japanese teammates, causing some of the more sensitive souls among them, such as Corbin Bernson and Robert Redford, to cry silently in the locker room corner. Tensions will hit a peak when Kenji Johjima of the Mariners offers Mike Piazza of the Padres a hot dog spiked with three tablespoons of wasabi during the All-Star Home Run Derby, then shouts, “If you can’t take the heat, you should have stayed out of the World Baseball Classic! Go Italy! Go Italy!”, as Piazza writhes in agony, desperately shoving handfuls of grass into his mouth. In retaliation, Piazza will offer Johjima’s wife a cannoli filled with Ben-Gay.
  
  
• Star outfielder and pharmaceutical industry-savior Barry Bonds will have another fine season, but will wear on the patience of fans due to his time-consuming league-imposed requirement to give a urine sample after each pitch of an at-bat (but only on days ending in a “y”). He will bear this burden with his characteristic cheerfulness and goodwill.
  
  
• In a controversial attempt to increase interest and distract fans from the steroid controversy, the San Francisco Giants will field an all-transsexual prostitute team for the first time since 1956, and will change its team colors from black and orange to transparent and gossamer. Many familiar faces from my old neighborhood will find their true callings on the diamond, and "Lady Ho-diva" will stun the establishment by becoming only the second she-male to win the National League Batting Title.
  
  
• My beloved New York Mets will beat the Oakland Athletics in a rematch of the 1973 World Series, bringing an end to the decades-long torment of Spiro Agnew, who became the notorious goat of ’73 when he let David Cassidy’s slow grounder trickle through his legs, allowing the A’s to score the winning run. This time, New York ace lefty Jerry Seinfeld will outpitch Gertrude Stein of Oakland for a win in the pivotal Game Five. I will be able to buy my ticket at the Coliseum box office twenty minutes before the game, after which I will be ritually murdered in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot after hubristically shouting “Raiders Suck” in celebration.
  
  
• Washington D.C. fans will be dismayed when President Bush calls up the Nationals to active duty in order to make up for reduced Army recruitment. However, tears will turn to cheers when Livan Hernandez captures Osama Bin Laden and forces him to parade naked through the streets of our nation’s capital with Hernandez’s jockstrap on his head. In recognition, Bush announces that he will reverse the result of this year’s World Baseball Classic, naming the Nationals honorary world champions instead of Japan. This causes Japan to immediately declare war on the United States, but Bush reassures the public that they will be able to visit Japanese-born baseball stars such as Ichiro and Hideki Matsui in their spacious new semi-permanent spring training camps in the California desert.
  
  
• And now,as they say in the big leagues... Play Grand Theft Auto 4! I mean ball!

Several Short Things Which Are Probably Better than Nothing

1. The media is lying to you. This is a Jim Henson creation designed to distract you from any number of governmental and corporate scandals. (I know it's not by Pixar because it isn't giving me nightmares.) "Southern Tamandua"--that's not even a very good fake name. They could've at least called it a Lesser Jib-Warbling Cuddlymundi or something. You disappoint me, media conspiracy.

2. As a fan of the Other New York Team, I've learned to enjoy hating "Chipper" Jones of the Atlanta Braves, mainly because of his spirit-crushing heroics against the Mets, but also because of his ugly stupid face. So I was gratified to read this quote from The Chip, who's currently playing alongside the likewise ugly-stupid-faced Roger Clemens on the U.S.'s underachieving World Baseball Classic team:

Asked what he thought of Clemens after being with him on this team, Jones said: "He's more like Jesus than I thought. Guys would be huddled around talking smack in the clubhouse and Roger walks in. It's like the parting of the Red Sea."

Yeah, I remember it well: Jesus parted the Red Sea, right before he escaped the Romans and headed for the mountains of Pakistan. Way to know your Bible, you poor excuse for a Southern cracker.

2½. Other possible analogies Chipper Jones could've used to describe Roger Clemens:

• He's more like Abraham Lincoln than I thought. Guys would be huddled around talking smack in the clubhouse and Roger walks in. It's like the Battle of Trafalgar.
  
  
• He's more like Captain Kirk than I thought. Guys would be huddled around talking smack in the clubhouse and Roger walks in. It's like the death of Darth Vader.
  
  
• He's more like Richard Pryor than I thought. Guys would be huddled around talking smack in the clubhouse and Roger walks in. It's like that "Assassination of Buckwheat" sketch.
  
  
• He's more like Søren Kierkegaard than I thought. Guys would be huddled around talking smack in the clubhouse and Roger walks in. It's like the mind playing an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind's access to the empirical realm of space and time.
  
  
• He's more like Chunk from The Goonies than I thought. Guys would be huddled around talking smack in the clubhouse and Roger walks in. It's like that scene in The Goonies where Clark Gable says, "Frankly, Chunk, I don't give a damn." (Got more? Knock me out.)

3. Here is a picture of a fascinating no-hole Cheerio I found in my cereal this morning. If this isn't a sign of the coming apocalypse, I don't know what is.



...I said "probably" better than nothing.

Congratulations, White Sox!

Congratulations, White Sox!

Congratulations, White Sox!

Congratulations, White Sox!

Congratulations, White Sox!

Congratulations, White Sox!

Tids, Bits
I wrote something I really liked yesterday, so I decided to submit it to a couple of places. Once it's been rejected, I'll put it up here.

C-Baby and I went for Peking Duck last night with a group which included our friend Michael; afterwards, he commented that he loved the restaurant staff so much that he might "marry them all, and then they can become citizens."

Last year, the Mets were kind enough to suck it up early enough in the late-season that I had time to catch up with the goings-on amongst the real baseball teams, and was up to speed on who I would be cheering and/or jeering by the time the playoffs hit. Unfortunately, this season's team decided to hold off their inevitable catastrophic collapse until a few weeks ago, and now the prospect of having to start following the rest of the league, along with my recent teary-eyed parting of ways with Tivo®, has me so preemptively burned-out that I may just tune out completely until next May. Somebody give me a compelling reason to pay attention--don't say the A's--and I might consider otherwise.

My "Delicious Salad" post was such a hit that I'm thinking about never writing a post longer than two sentences again. Whoops, too late. [Trombone sound: Whah wah wah!]

Finally, I know it's deadly and all, but I kind of want to put some some cherry syrup on this hurricane and eat it.

Wrádio WULADica
So apparently there's this radio show called Open Source on PRI, which is sort of the AFL to NPR's NFL, or maybe the XFL to NPR's NFL Europe—although they do This American Life, so I guess I should give them a break—anyway: apparently they put together this compendium of blog posts from last Tuesday, in tribute to Bloomsday (see below), called it "Blogsday," and had the posts read by actors as a sort of grand democratic audio pastiche.

(Another web-quaintance of mine was also selected, which I assume is how they got here, possibly from one of my comments on his site such as the one which resulted in his calling me a "motherless whore.")

I had several thoughts on having my cyber-scribblings added to this project. Here they are:

Thought 1: Hey, that's great, I'm on the national airwaves, even if they did pick the least clever and entertaining paragraphs ever to flow from my virtual quill. And even if the actor delivered the lines as if I were a wild-eyed sports fanatic rather than an ironically detached cynic who nevertheless clings to faith in a few remaining incorruptible ideals such as the masochistic love for an ungrateful group of overpaid growth-hormone abusers, displayed through the symbolic waving of brightly colored foam fingers. But hey, at least I'm on the air.

Thought 2: Well, I understand that they didn't have time to ask permission, but I do have a Creative Commons license which allows for credited borrowing, so no biggie. And it'll be great to hear them mention C-Baby's name. Oh, except they edited out that part. Oh well, I'm sure they'll make some quick credit on the air. Huh, they didn't. Well, they'll probably list the contributors at the end. No, I guess not. Well, they did say they'd post credits on the website, and maybe I'll get some new traffic from that link. Hmm, that's interesting, they only posted the credits to the halfway mark, and I'm forty-five minutes in. Well, I'm sure they'll update that soon. (Haven't yet.)

Die-hard WULAD fans can listen to the show here (my "contribution" is at 45:30); I warn you, however, that the collage effect can be a little jarring, and serves to make my writing seem even more trite than it already is—something like:

Man's voice: "...So then my buddy picked his severed leg off the blood-soaked ground and we crawled back to Checkpoint Alpha Bravo on our hands and knees..."

Woman's voice: "...looking into my baby's loving eyes for the first time..."

Man's voice: "Go Mets! Woo-hoo!"

Woman's voice: "The biopsy results are due back today."

Anyway, "All Things Considered," (Get it?!) I suppose it's a good thing, even if they did feel the need to say, "No certifiable geniuses that we've discovered today." Tell that to the "Certified Genius" certificate on my wall, sumbitches!

[Note to producers of said show: Please use my stuff again. That chest-beating was an act. I love you.]

NOTE: Today is the last day to enter the poetry contest. If you gonna bring it, bring it.