Okay, we have one Baseball position in this series...Outfield...I've noticed, the biggest factor for the most part seems to be offensive numbers...well, except when 3B...Read More
The Domers got a taste of what it feels like to be outmatched. Like Ohio State and a litany of other hopefuls, their feelings of belonging were quickly put to rest. One person stated it beautifully when they said, “The National Championship Game, where Non-SEC schools go to die”.
But this humor comes as no surprise to teams often unable to beat the Tide. At this point-in-time, it is more like ‘Groundhog’s Day’, where the outcome will always be the same. I could see Bill Murray driving with the ground hog as they go off the cliff, only to repeat the day over and over and with the BCS title still being in the hands of the SEC.
The guy who wore #9 for the Irish was hugely overweight. I quipped that it looked one of his numbers were missing and there should be a 7 or another 9 to make it look right.
The highlight of the evening came when Brent Musburger was fixated with a women, roughly one-third his own age. And considering the score the only question was Cialis or Viagra?
The next controversy, following the game, was a few days later when Johnny Football was partaking of some self-medicating. Instead of Britney’s exposure or a random camel-toe, this story would do.
After such a mediocre season (kidding), why would he be drinking champagne? It isn’t like the media types don’t take chances! See: Brent Musburger.
I can imagine these vultures with their sharp leaded pencils making haste to ruin yet another life. In a sonorous tone, their mighty quills will strike paper like a Thor’s hammer. They will beat this story so hard, that they will reach their sexual highs and then tell you how much they care about the health and safety of young people.
My favorite whipping boy, Bob Costas is finding a way of making it about him. I can imagine steam rising up from his toupe and taking adrenaline just to keep up. For doing what? What all young people do and what he did when he was young. And to allude to us as children, just before he trips over his tricked-out walker. I’ve heard to relax, he watches Beavis and Butthead Across America with his favorite scene being the prospects of a full-cavity search.
Okay another rant here. You all know the show called ‘Operation Repo’, where the young girl, allegedly is actually like 34 years old and they treat her like a kid. Ha!!! Come on now and she is saying expressions like ‘Really’? And then she alludes to Facebook. Like a teenager out past curfew, she sits and pouts. How rich! It must annoy her when Matt’s beautiful daughter is younger and prettier!
I would love to see Matt get his butt beat by the Marine who does the property management stuff. Still, I find it funny when undermines the so-called young girl. Lynda!
Well the weather is beginning to warm up again, reminding me of Tampa, Florida for this time of year. It is getting to the point where people will say, “it hasn’t snowed here for 40 years”! LOL.
In college basketball things are not so settled. With re-alignment the former Big Whatever has chosen another way to describe their conference and even more bizarre is the possibility of conferences going defunct like the old Southwest Conference. I bet Alec Trebec would have difficulty keeping up with all the changes.
What we need is a reality show. We could feature the buffoons of the NCAA trying to keep up with all the drugs, failing grades and now, athletes drinking or getting a milkshake from a booster or assistant coach. The possibilities are endless and probably as entertaining as those two guys in the Sonic commercials.
Speaking of reality shows, how about ones Doctors actually telling people about the side effects of medications. Like with those medications for sex, where they have to talk to their doctors, to see if you healthy enough to have sex. Okay they are pimping a drug to get you in the mood but the people are in two different tubs. Here is an idea, get one big tub!! Or advice like don’t stand in the rain trying to be cute. And don’t try so hard!!
Well enough of sublime silliness. I have Monte Python on speed dial and a miracle ear. You can never start too soon.
Each week I try to make Monday Moaning fun, it least part of it, if only the opening picture...But this week, after the picture, we're going to get serious for a minute...
I would consider myself a fucking asshole if I didn't write a bit about the 30 U.S. military members who killed in Afghanistan this weekend...22 of those 30 were Navy SEALS...They went in to help a Army Rangers who had come under heavy fire...They subdued the attackers and were on their way out, when their chopper was struck by at least one RPG...It went down, and they are all gone...
Just a bit of cold harsh reality for everyone out there who thought this shit was over after Bin Laden got whacked...It's not! 10 years our country's best, and bravest have been fighting in that shit-hole, and there's no end in sight...And for our best and bravest, it's not over for them when they finally make it home from that hell...Remember that!
Then Friday night I took on LeBron_James_&_Tim_Tebow...Those two chicken shits haven't gotten back to me via Twitter yet...Cowards!
My pal Irish Shu posted a good blog Michael_Floyd...I have to say, the kid is one of the elite receivers in college, and he plays for my team, but he got off to easy...
Another blog this weekend brought up Carson Palmer...People have been taking shots at the guy, and as much as it pains me, I have to defend him...People want to bring up honoring his contract...Ummm, he left the money on the table...He isn't getting paid now...
Besides that, when have teams honored contracts...The NFL doesn't have those nice MLB guaranteed contracts...Players are cut every year and the teams are off the hook for the cash...I'm so tired of that lame and wrong argument...
Palmer has put up with a horrible organization...With horrible facilities...With a horrible front office...with horrible coaches...And a roster full of criminals...Why should he put up with anymore crap? He has every right to ask for a trade or release...And every right to retire if the team doesn't give that to him.
Tiger Woods was in North East Ohio this weekend...I thought he was coming to play Golf, but this was the first thing he said when he showed up...
Oh, and Tiger, how did that feel seeing the guy you fired, rolling with the winner this weekend? Just another bruise on that giant ego!
Last week I talked about being happy to see the Indians and Pirates actually be buyers before the trade deadline...Now look, the Indians blew 2 out of 4 in Boston, and they kept trying to hand games to Texas this weekend...And Pittsburgh...Holy shit have they fallen apart...It's slipping away for both teams...
And as much as I love Boston, and I love that the Red Sox have owned the Yankees this year, I'm really getting tired of ESPN and the MLB Network trying to force this rivalry on us...NO one cares anymore, except fans of those two teams...It's hard to be a rivalry when there is no tension between the teams...Christ Jeter gets called out at second, and he smiles, taps Pedroia on the ass...That's not a rivalry, that's just Jeter saying he's tired of chicks and wants a dick in his mouth!
A new television season is threatening us and, if we are to believe the schedules, reality programming is the thing. Mostly because it's cheap to produce but also because television as a whole has discovered that we'd rather watch people being people. Or at least television's version of people being real people. Apparently we like to watch our fellow man being stranded in other worldly situations and how they react. Whether i't's on some island or chained in a studio in exotic Burbank, we'll watch it. But all that “reality” made me wonder; Are shows about sports reality?
As we now seem to define this refined genre, the answer is no. Whatever the sport, it's played as the contest it was meant to be with rules, regulations and no fiddling by the production staff. (Although an occasional interfering staff might spice things up. I'm not sure how it could be done but let us say that in baseball the field goes blank, a commercial is run and when we're returned, a runner has advanced from first to third, the count is 2 and 3, the home run king is at bat and a tornado is threatening the stadium. Now that's interesting, if not a bit overly dramatic, but none of this tedium of an infinity of nothing much happening. Clearly, in this circumstance, a lot is happening and more is probably going to happen. It's the sort of impending disaster that makes networks click their heels with delight. This is even better than sending a phalanx of reporters to stand on beaches awaiting hurricanes that, oops, go the other way and leave some chump standing on the sand predicting grave things whilst behind him a family of five has a picnic and puts on sun tan lotion. Reality isn't always what it's cracked up to be.
Alan Funt, creator of “Candid Camera” probably started the mania for reality programming decades ago by setting up amusing, slightly titillating situations and then ordinary people wander in and we, the viewer, got to see the results. (My favourite was Fanny Flagg as a real estate agent showing people a terrific apartment save that it had no bathroom. At one point she's asked “Where did they go?” to which she answers, “I think they moved to California.”) The next step (and some might say we're on a descending staircase) is “America's Funniest Home Videos”. With an “everyman” host and an audience that apparently is carpet scented with laughing gas, we watch as videos sent in my home viewers are batched together, sometimes with a musical score and (a lesson on how to make even the most boring things amusing) shown backwards, it was a hit. I should say is a hit for it's now in it's third or fourth iteration and shows no signs of failing. But over the years they've developed several categories of things that are “can't miss” with an audience. Drooling children are always good as are animals doing goofy things. People falling down or falling into something works as does vehicular accidents. Conveniently there are two distinct seasons, summer and winter, (fall and spring don't seem to have produced the necessary stupidity of the the other two) so you've got people making asses of themselves in the snow and in bathing suits by the beach/lake/pond/river etc. And then there's the grand finale, the one that never misses, reduces the studio audience to wetting themselves with merriment: Men Getting Hit In The Crotch.
From there it's just a short stroll to the diamond, the grid iron, the court, the links or the court. Where else are there so many opportunities to watch men take in the nuts as these? And if that isn't reality programming I cannot think what is. For thousands of years we've been watching other people do other things. (The Greeks did them in the nude which not only offered a more visible target but ones that bounced and flopped and provided a moving target as well.) In the sixteenth century Scotland banned golf and soccer as it was taking too much time away from preparing for war with-who else?-the English. (Were the two on better terms back then, there'd be no Ex-Tees line, Hadrian's Wall no Mary Queen of Scots [It's reported she had a three handicap] and the British open could be centuries old, not just a hundred plus years.) Depending on where you live and your relationship to your neighbours, sport was often the precursor to or the follow on of a battle. Even today in Central America there are national teams in “futbol” whose games are played on the frontier of the two countries. Doing it that way permits the armies of both countries to “hang around” and do as best they can with the fans whose motives in being at the game are questionable. Isn't that reality? I should think so.
There is, however, a critical mass that suggests reality is only that which has no advance planning, life is lived as one giant “happening” and if you're lucky enough you get in on tape or there are cameras there just incidental to what actually happened. (An example of this is a reporter interviewing a police officer about how they caught the escaped Zebra from the zoo when a massive car crash occurs just behind them.) But all this spontaneity needs to be edited to be interesting. The city of London has so many monitoring cameras about that surely in but a few hours enough funny things must happen to at least get an hour's programme once a week from it. But then with hundreds of cameras just the viewing all the goings on would take longer than possible to produce a show. I am amongst those who find “contrived” television tedious and predictable. Once they've told you the “set up” then the results are reasonably predictable. Sport, to the contrary, is not.
Any game or sport is not a “contrived” moment in time, but rather the gathering of players and, hopefully, fans to see how this plays out within the structure of the rules. (Even is no one is entirely sure of the rules as they're changed rather too often.) We don't know if a manager is going to be ejected for clocking an umpire, we don't know whether a tee shot is going to carry the water and knock out someone in the gallery, we don't know if the puck will go the length of the ice and score a goal, we don't know if a kick off will be returned 110 yards for a score but we're there to find out. None of these are predictable variables. And that's the difference between “reality” television and sports television. “Reality” shows go out of their way to make sure we do understand what they want to happen. You do not send people on a walking tour of a colony of fire ants without having some vague idea as to the consequences. The audience, too, has that same “vague” idea and they're whetting their lips for the first yelps of pain. Sports starts with a basic situation but nothing more. Whatever will happen creates the entertainment and hold our attention. Those fire ant walkers, after the first few trots across the sand, have proved what will happen, players have no clue what will happen next save that they need to be agile in their thinking to accommodate the circumstance. There's always a chance in sports whereas reality TV eliminates that. They want us to believe otherwise but in something that structured, but, really, we do not. Also, just to up the level of preying on humanity for pictures, we now have the circus of the deranged being the “stars”. People who are unable to care for themselves, have manias, quite serious programmes are presented as, I guess, morality tales to make us glad what's happening to them is not happening to us. Sports on the other hand, wants to make us happy about what happens. Although in the natural course of things, one side will not be.
At the end we make sports real to each of us. We can take it or leave it, love it or loathe it but the core of it is to show things we are familiar with being demonstrated in the unending number of ways that things can happen. And we shouldn't want it any other way.
