This piece by Juan Cole ends on a perfect note: it’s one thing to make a disastrous mistake for the first time, but when the opportunity to predict the mistake’s consequences exists and one still undertakes the same disaster, then it goes beyond tragedy and into something worse.
Yay Barry! Yay baseball!
I would like to take this post to acknowledge that, unlike Rick Reilly or any of the sports media world’s other garment-rending, tsk-tsking tradition police, I’m taking a real stand on Barry Bonds’ new MLB career homerun record:
This is the greatest thing to happen in baseball in 30 years, and perhaps ever.
Remember when baseball was cool? Yeah, it really wasn’t that long ago, maybe the 1980s or even pre-1994. Skinny dudes like Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Bonds (see photo), or big fat guys like Tony Gwynn and Fernando Valenzuela, were the real stars of the day: they could hit (well, maybe not Barry in the 1990-1992 NLCS), field, pitch and occasionally even crush a 500-footer over the fence. Hell, teams even wore brown uniforms with pride, so great was baseball’s prestige.
What about 2007? Today, Major League Baseball is proud to note that its fan base consists entirely of the residents of Boston and New York, the yuppies of Chicago’s North Side, a smattering of bandwagoners in Los Angeles and San Francisco, some dudes in Seattle, the city of St. Louis, and George Will. The rest of us get a kick out of watching the national media wring their clammy hands and pull out their hair over steroids and pennant races, because we know that they’d really feel a lot better about the sporting world if they just calmed down and waited for NFL Week 1 like the rest of the 300 million people in this great nation.
I keed, I keed. Well, no, I don’t.
Major League Baseball is hella busted. We’ve had a baseball class system for some years now (my dislike isn’t based entirely on the Pirates’ performance: do you think the residents of Milwaukee, Baltimore, Toronto, Cincinnati, Tampa Bay, Detroit (except for last year), Kansas City, San Diego, Cleveland, Florida or Philadelphia really feel that much better about the past 10 years?) and it shows no signs of improving, because even with revenue sharing, who’s going to compete against a baseball-crazed East Coast media market? Then you have the drugs, which while a problem in other sports, don’t seem to have the same, “Yeah Mom, I’ll clean it up, just let me just beat the mall, beach and warehouse boards in Skate or Die 2 first!” result that they do on baseball’s leadership. Football and basketball offer us genetic-freak gladiators without shame, and in fact portray their players as a warrior elite; baseball still clings to its all-American, Charlie-Hustle (admitted gambler, BTW) tradition even as we watch 250-lb. behemoths smash balls over the fence.
Barry Bonds’ No. 756 is the icing on the crap-flavored cake that we’ve been served in the past decade by the powers behind MLB. Baseball’s most glamorous record is now held by a universally-loathed, self-pitying, race-baiting bully with a head like Space Ghost and a disposition rivaling Albert Belle. Does the public like it? No!
It seems to me that Bonds’ asterisk-ridden eclipse of Hank Aaron’s record is exactly the kick in the butt that MLB needs to blow itself up and start over. Baseball managed to learn from Ty Cobb that “Pistol-whipping a man for being of a different race is bad! OMG!” We haven’t seen any pistol-whippings lately, so in a more minor offense, surely baseball can learn that “Letting a chemically-juiced potato-head break our most cherished record is probably bad! LOL!”
And I would also like to applaud the Pittsburgh Pirates for attempting to break the all-time unintended crowd-booing record with this effort! Time to usurp Dick Cheney‘s record!
(For real, putting a tribute to Barry “I failed you in the playoffs and then left you for more money than you could afford” Bonds on the video screen in Pittsburgh? Is this a joke by some really smart dude in the Pirates p.r. office who likes to make people mad and then laugh at how he did so? If so, kudos to you, sir!)
A good one from Iowa:
BETTENDORF, Iowa – Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday defended his five sons’ decision not to enlist in the military, saying they’re showing their support for the country by “helping me get elected.”
I have no beef with the civilian sons part; they can do whatever they choose with their lives. That said, is it really a good campaign move to imply that aiding one’s personal ascent to power is comparable to a soldier or sailor risking life and limb? I’m sure that many national politicians think thusly, but most of them are at least savvy enough to lie about it on the campaign trail.
Nope.
“What?! The Internet is public?! Who knew?”
Peace, I’m out.
This one’s kind of a stretch, but still from a cool site.
I’m sitting here watching episode No. 2 in a row of Human Weapon, the History Channel’s show where two guys go around the globe and do martial-arts training native to various locations. I’d say they do maybe five minutes of actual history in these shows — all of which seems to center around the Pacific Theater of World War II, though I suppose the Japanese really did cause a lot of martial upheaval in East Asia. Meanwhile we’ve just been to a commercial break, where the three promos were for another episode of Human Weapon (although set in France – what are they going to do without all that Eastern-mysticism filler material used by all martial-arts media in America?), an episode of The Universe detailing gaseous nebulas, and an episode of Ice Truckers, which is a show where guys drive trucks across ice. Great history lessons, all.
What happened here? The History Channel is going through the same thing that happened to the Discovery Channel, where they get really popular by exploiting a niche, find that they’ve filled the niche, spin off new networks into even smaller niches (think The Military History Channel or Discovery Times), cast a wider net with the flagship channel to keep growing the audience, then sit back and notice that the parent channel has become nothing like its original self.
It’s a process towards the same middle, in which the channel’s programming becomes a matter of throwing lots of stuff on the air and hoping some of it sticks, topical niche be damned. That’s probably good from a business standpoint, because it means your channel can compete with lots of other channels (including the old-school networks) for the same larger audience. But for someone like me who just wants to tune in now and then for some black and white D-Day footage with fact-laden narration—the name is “The History Channel”, after all—well hey, not as cool.
P.S. – They do lots of computer animations on this show of particular fighting moves, and each time they overlay the move with lots of chalk-drawn equations. What’s the percentage of the audience that actually knows whether those equations are accurate? If you transported a TV audience from the 1950s, would they still fall for the “Wow math, this is smart stuff!” trick? It could be appropriate physics, or the show could be writing out a simple derivative; I know I can’t tell.
The lesson is this: if you want to be an intellectual authority on TV, either a. have your info narrated by an upper-class British guy or b. show lots of formulas. Easy!
