And it’s not that I’m an elitist, but I think it’s going to be hard to take seriously the opinions, etc., of a man who lives in Emporia, Kansas. – Regular Sean Fri
It would have been worse if I’d stayed in Decorah, Iowa, wouldn’t it?
OK, you know that I’m your favorite conservative, so you’ll be shocked to hear me say ‘I don’t a crap about gay marriage; why should gays be excluded from the hell and misery that only being locked in a marriage can bring?’. – Ralph Snart, the man who attempts to keep me grounded in reality
Exactly my point, Ralph. If someone wants to go through the misery of a marriage, who are we to deny them?
In Memoriam: Tony Randall. May I suggest that you clean your domiciles in tribute?
Ah, a complete lack of inspiration on my part…I have no idea why, really. I mean, there’s pretty much nothing in the news that I want to discuss, but I can make something out of it. You know, bitch and moan that the next PM of India isn’t isn’t Vijay Singh instead of Manmohan Singh. Alan Greenspan officially sticking around is cool by me too. But there’s nothing to write about. It’s the same stories continuing on the same level. I’ll try to pull something out of my ass, but don’t expect, like, quality or anything…
THE PIMP SECTION
Okay, first of all, the guys I missed because they were posted at the same time I was:
Biscuiti, Chris Isomer does his first wrestling column in dog’s years, and it’s for a charitable cause. He should also note that I have never used the exclamation point in connection with Smackdown, nor spelled Raw in all caps.
Laflin is his usual godlike self.
Urciuolo recognizes that all of Europe was indeed at war in 1812 just as we on the American continent were. It’s good to see that someone knows their history.
And now on to the non-make-up pimps. Jesus Fucking Christ, there are a load of them, and lotsa debuts to deal with…
Haley defends Bradshaw, which is his right. But he should know better than to defend Flex with me around.
Conley recaps the B show of a B fed, which is still pretty high up there on the food chain.
What Gamble said in re the political stuff. Hey, he did a great job at it, so I don’t have to elaborate any further.
Daniels, Bryant Subordinate discusses baseball. Well, so will I later on.
CKOne is obsessed with hockey. Good for him, except for one thing: the sun is shining, I’m out on the course, and the A/C is on in my apartment. That somehow doesn’t spell “hockey” in my brain. But maybe I have to be Canadian to have the right neural hookups.
Bradford makes eating brains sound like fun.
Geist recaps that show you idiots are all obsessed with.
Come on, Smil, that’s good that BMI gave Mark Mothersbaugh an award. Instead you whipped them, whipped them good.
Cocozza has a near miss.
Bernstein reviews Anal-Ass Moron-Shit’s new release.
Yes, Rutherford, sometimes things do suck. And I’m right there with you on the whole back thing.
Unfortunately, Misha, we didn’t get our wish. According to Variety, Enterprise has been renewed. Too bad Reed lost his boyfriend during the latest episode, huh?
I gave Yeager a couple column name ideas a while back. And when speaking of the conference, did you mean Jordan Mechner, who created Prince of Persia?
Lucard goes Jap on us again. Well, he’s at least being informative.
Stevens and Erhardt give you more info about the DC Universe than you can hope to assimilate.
AND, AGAIN, FOR YOU EDUCATION AND EDIFICATION…
We still have people advertising spyware on this site. Therefore, I will still provide the links to effective, easy-to-use, functional anti-spyware programs.
Spybot and AdAware. The ONLY two spyware removal tools to trust. Do NOT buy any spyware removal tools, because none of them work better than these two, and all of them except these two are suspect.
SpywareBlaster. Will nuke twelve hundred different potentially malicious ActiveX controls, and now has the ability to prevent a number of non-ActiveX methods of installing spyware for people who use Mozilla/Firefox.
SpywareGuard. From Javacool, like SpywareBlaster. It’s a real-time scanner for spyware. A decent first line of defense.
IE-SpyAd. Throws numerous ad-related URLs into IE’s Restricted Zone, where they won’t display or affect your system. Bookmark this one, since it’s the only one that doesn’t have an in-program update.
Of course, only download them from the links provided above.
Regular Ian Wright asks this about the subject in question:
A couple of quick questions about the programs that you’ve been pushing recently (ones that I’m embarrassed not to know given my computing background).
When I have them installed whats the procedure for getting the most out of them?
Constantly running them when I’m online? Periodically running a scan with them? And is its the latter how often would you recommend doing it, I’m online every day.
With AdAware and Spybot, check for updates using their internal update function at least once a week. Run them at least once a week or whenever you think you might have problems. Remember, the new version of Spybot has browser protection capabilities, so have that run at startup and leave it running. Check for updates to SpywareBlaster once a week. It only needs to be run once initially in order to establish protection. Then, after it downloads updates, just click on the line that says “Enable Protection For All Unprotected Items” (definitely run that one, since they just put in another database update in the last couple days) and kill it. It doesn’t need to be active. For IE-SpyAd, bookmark the site and check for updates twice a week, since it has no kind of internal updater. Since all it does is add Registry entries, it doesn’t eat up anything.
If you’re having trouble with spyware or a browser hijacker, or think that you do, head over to the SpywareInfo Forums, where the pros there can help you diagnose and get rid of stuff. And to the person who wrote me about CWShredder like it was something that I didn’t know about, I only start giving links to that kind of material when people write me and ask me about their spyware problems. I’ve known about CWShredder since Merijn started writing it.
PERFECTION REFLECTION
One of the reasons I don’t like baseball is the obsessive nature of certain fans. The absolute ridiculity of the Reign of Terror when it comes to statistics and those numbers’ influence on pundits and influential people provides a distortion of perspective, especially when it comes to evaluating a career as a whole. It’s the pundits and influential people who determine who joins the immortals in Cooperstown. The problem with them is that their opinions are often judged by outdated or standards that fail to take into account the changes in the game.
(And it works both ways. Keith Olbermann has always bemoaned that players from the Nineteenth Century are insufficiently represented due to attempting to apply modern standards to their achievments, which makes the numbers, the only records we have of them (no film, no videotape), look paltry and not “worthy”. He has a point.)
Believe it or not, there are people in the BBWAA, and a lot of them, who insisted that they wouldn’t vote for Randy Johnson for the Hall of Fame. The knock on him was not enough wins for the length of a career as long as his, and too high of an ERA. These same writers don’t recognize the role of the relief pitcher and the fact that hitters over the past decade and a half are better than they ever were thanks to various and sundry reasons (of which steroids is only one). I hope that those voters who have said this have been shut up permanently today.
Except for twenty Ks in a game, a perfect game is the rarest pitching feat in baseball. Twenty-seven up, twenty-seven down, no man allowed on base for any reason. The greatest of pitchers go their entire careers without pitching one, or even coming close. Nolan Ryan had seven no-hitters, but never a perfect game, just to name the most prominent example. Bob Feller never pitched one. Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez have never pitched one (although Martinez is given partial credit for a perfect game he had through nine innings that he lost in the tenth). Some guys have their careers defined by a no-hitter (Don Larsen, anyone?). And now Big Unit’s become the oldest man in the history of the game to pitch one, three years older than the previous record. He’s joined Sandy Koufax, Jim Bunning, two innings of Mike Witt, and the guy whose name is on the award that Unit’s won five times as the only guys to throw a perfect game and another no-hitter at some point in their careers.
And yet there’s some writers out there who are saying it still isn’t enough for him to enter the Hall. They’re still pulling out the same arguments. “He’s not going to get three hundred wins.” Hello? Except for Maddux (and Clemens, of course, who’s already past the mark), no active pitcher will get three hundred wins. The game isn’t like that anymore. And yet there are some imbeciles who will hold that fact against him. They f*cked over Bunning that way. The Vets’ Committee had to get him in. And Johnson and Bunning have similar numbers (Bunning’s record, though, is distinctively worse; however, the Sixties were an era of dominant pitching where guys stayed in longer and took more losses). Logic does not penetrate the skulls of baseball writers.
Look at the CV. Five Cy Youngs, a World Series ring, a twenty-K performance, two no-hitters including a perfect game, and a record of dominance in his era matched by few. It takes mental gymnastics of Olympic level to deny him a place in Cooperstown when his time comes. But some baseball writers are willing to undergo them.
And you thought the IWC was bad.
MORE SPORTS? THIS TIME NOT AMERICAN SPORTS? OKAY!
Congrats to Valencia for their victory in the UEFA Cup finals. Although I’m not sure of how much congratulations they should get. Like most Americans, even ones who’ve lived in Europe like I have, I’m still confused about the transnational tournaments, like who gets in, etc. I know that the fifth through seventh-place teams in the Premier League in the UK get into the UEFA Cup, while the top four get into the Champions’ Cup, which I thoroughly understand is the Big Kahuna. I know the Cup Winners’ Cup was eliminated a few years ago and merged into the UEFA Cup, but did that improve its status? To me, the UEFA Cup seems to be the consolation prize, while the national cups and the Champions’ Cup are the ones to shoot for.
Do supporters of teams get excited when those teams qualify for the UEFA Cup? Or is it like high-level and high-profile college football teams here in the US not getting into a BCS bowl and instead going to the, oh, Gator Bowl or Cotton Bowl? I know that college football fans get really depressed if their team’s “relegated” to what they consider a second-class bowl. Does the same thing happen here? Are fans pissed because a team “only” made the UEFA Cup?
This is not to disparage what Valencia did. This is the first time they’ve cashed in on a transnational level in almost a quarter-century. But it just seems so…well, second-rate. Maybe the UEFA Cup is really the European equivalent of saying you’ve won the AL Central.
WHAT WOULD TAJIRI DO?
So, Tony Blair got hit by some purple powder during Question Time, huh?
I just have one question.
Purple?
It was actually blue corn powder, but it was distinctly purple in color.
The group responsible for the incident is called Fathers 4 Justice, a fathers’ rights group, who have a tendency to go overboard. Here’s some of their previous actions as explained by cnn.com:
In November member David Chick, dressed as Spiderman, climbed atop a crane beside London’s Tower Bridge, forcing police to close the busy traffic route and leading to huge traffic jams.
Four members of the group — dressed as Spiderman, Superman, Batman and Robin — also climbed Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge in February, leading to its closure.
Let’s see, they dress up like superheroes and throw purple power. And they’re heterosexual? Man, only in the UK…they really, really need their own version of Queer Eye over there, like, now. These guys have got to learn some basic good taste. Plus, how counterproductive are their activities? They want more access to their kids. That’s pretty noble these days, men actually taking an interest in the raising of their children. So their organization has good intentions. But what kind of judge is going to award increased custody rights because of the actions of guys who dress like superheroes and throw powder at the Prime Minister? If I’m a jurist over there, I’m going to start handing out more sole custody to the mothers just based on these yo-yos behaving like idiots.
And the reaction to this…oh, boy. The idiots were arrested; that’s to be expected. But the cops donned NBC gear. They immediately went into “Oh, shit, it’s anthrax” mode. Going to MOPP 4 must have really settled the MPs down, huh? Man, everything’s a terrorist act these days, isn’t it? And you know what this means. Yep, another crackdown. And since it happened in Our Most Important Ally’s house of government, it’s going to spread here to the US as well. When’s Attorney General Bormann going to get on the TV and start yapping about how PM Blair could have been killed? Christ knows he’ll make a connection between disgruntled fathers wanting more custody rights and al-Qaeda.
Damn, I’m sick of this shit. There’s one way to end it, you know. It happens the first Tuesday in November. Maybe the good effects will spread across the pond as well. God knows that Blair wasn’t being assaulted when Clinton was president.
I’ll save Mailbag for next week, I think. There’s just nothing that floats my boat. Well, you can enjoy yourselves in whatever manner you see fit. I think I’ll go surf for porn.
