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Archives for August 2019

Controversy

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Tempests in teapots
The things that set people off into ALL CAPS rages continues to amaze me. From pumpkin spice anything to the colors of the new line of Hyundai’s. Now, if they made pumpkin spiced Hyundai’s then I could understand. Nah, I still wouldn’t care. Even so, high dudgeon appears to be attainable via the slightest provocation. And never is that more true than in the world of superheroes. What? You thought I was going to dive into politics? Sorry buddy, I gave up low hanging fruit when I dumped all my Florida stories. From Ben Affleck ruining Batman for all, he didn’t, to Gal Gadot not being American, neither was Wonder Woman, to Robert Downey Jr. being a horrible actor, he’s not, to Black Panther being a waste of white people’s money, it wasn’t, etc. On and on it goes. This will ruin civilization, or that will destroy all human morals, or something even more dire. None of the arguments have any validity when looked at logically, but people keep making them.
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Let’s Nuke Some Sh*t

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SPF 1000000 required.

If you’ve wandered near the internet lately, and managed not to run and hide from all the politics, you’ve heard about how Elon Musk wants to nuke Mars and Jeff Bezos thinks that moon hotels are a spiffy idea. Both of these men are smart, stupidly rich, and capable of making their own dreams cone true. There is just a little, teensy, thing that neither man is comfortable admitting; they’re going to cause a lot of people to die for no reason. You see, in layman’s terms, both ideas are stupid. I mean fatally misguided. Essentially, without wasting the rest of your week on boring math, it all comes down to this; on a planet with basic Earth gravity, air pressure, and wind currents, their ideas are fine. Neither location even remotely fits that description.
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The Joys of Extinction

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Goat is a delicacy all over the world.

Back on January 10, 2013, I wrote a whimsical missive about how Floridians may be the stupidest, and most dangerous, morons on Earth. Not much has changed since then. Back then they authorized regular citizens to wander the Everglades and hunt pythons with handguns. For those who don’t party with giant constrictors, pythons can get to twenty feet long, a couple hundred pounds, and can kill and eat a four or five year old child without effort. Hunting them with handguns is akin to hunting rogue elephants with a slingshot. It can be done, but your aim better be amazing since you won’t get a second shot. Long time fan of the Friday edition of The Big Wake Up Call, the weekly radio companion to this blog, Roger (last name withheld by request) over at Smithsonian Magazine, sent me THIS LINK to update me on how well things have gone since then. [Read more…] about The Joys of Extinction

Stay Home and Ignore People

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Girls just wanna have fun, and kick butt, and enjoy a nice red wine.
Before the Comics Code Authority comics told stories. Yes, many were silly, some were obvious rip offs of others, but, in the main, they told stories. They tended to love America, wish all people were treated equal, and offered new ways to look at old problems. To be honest, they had problems too. Societal racism was a constant thing and comic creators were no more immune to it than anyone else. Some confronted it, others continued it. I could do an entire dissertation on race in comics and still not scratch the surface. But, after the Comics Code, any sense of nuance died. Any attempt to tackle social issues was shelved. For a simple example, Batman, in 1939, was a vigilante who killed and worked with the seedy underbelly of society to mete out a larger theme of justice. After …? Bang, zoom, pow. The Batman of the ’60s. [Read more…] about Stay Home and Ignore People

Those Halcyon Days of Yore

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Back then.
Unlike my usual stuff, this is tied directly to Chicago sports, and the early part of the century. It’s a part of my life that’s gone, but which I still take pride in. Even if you don’t get all the references, I hope you enjoy the story.

Jay the Joke was started out by Patrick Dahl (son of Steve & Janet) and his partner in crime, Matt Lynch. It was built exclusively to belittle Jay Mariotti. Yes, I know, low hanging fruit and all that. Still and all, they got a lot of pub, made the site into something fun, and used it, in part, to springboard their careers.

I bought the site in 2008 and turned it into more of a local sports site which still managed to take nasty, and hilarious, swipes at the little man*. With help from MLB.com I was able to get access to stuff no one else had and the site became the guilty go-to stop for real sportswriters, several of whom I am friends with to this day. More than once I had a story days or weeks before the regular media. [Read more…] about Those Halcyon Days of Yore