Douchenozzle of the Year?

Luke Scott made news last year by introducing himself to folks outside of Baltimore (where he plays for the Orioles) by questioning whether or not President Barack Obama was really born in the United States and teetering on the edge of a lot of not very veiled racism. It made some news on a few sports blogs, and Twitter, and it was good off-season fun to poke fun at a guy who, despite being called a "star" in the linked article above, isn't much of one and has every right to his own misguided opinions.

But this, via Deadspin, is worse. In an interview with ESPN, the Sports Leader essentially apologizes for his behavior with lines like this:

Scott is one of baseball's most complex characters. His questions about President Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship put him in headlines during an otherwise-quiet offseason. He speaks bluntly and with heavy opinions. He's fluent in Spanish and loves Latin culture, but in the clubhouse, he'll make potentially inflammatory comments to a Latino player who is his best friend -- throwing plantain chips at him to keep him in line. He wears religion on his sleeve.


Given all that, the simple assumption is that Scott is a right-wing nut, a borderline racist and a loudmouth redneck ballplayer who should keep his mouth shut.


But it's not that simple. Luke Scott will require a deeper line of thinking.

Will he? It doesn't really seem like it.

"[Outfielder] Felix [Pie] is my friend," he says. "I give him a hard time. The reason why I give him a hard time is because there are certain people you deal with and you go up and talk to them, and it doesn't work. They don't understand.


"I tell him about some of the ways he's acted: 'Look, you're acting like an animal, you're acting like a savage.'"
Scott turns to his locker and pulls out a bag of plantain chips.


"So I throw bananas in his helmet. Here are my banana chips to remind him that whenever he acts like an animal, 'Hey, that's what other people are thinking. They're just not telling you, but that's what they're thinking about. And I'm telling you so that you're aware of that so you can make a cognitive decision to not behave like that.' I would want someone to tell me that instead of letting you making a jerk of yourself." 

The word you are looking for is ... "WOW."

Again, good for him - he's proud of his beliefs, however ignorant they may be. (Read the whole article to learn more about this backward ass shithead, if you wish.) But why glorify it? Let's forget the part where Amy Nelson counters Scott's incorrect, ignorant belief that Obama is not from this country by saying "with some bloggers saying that evidence Obama was born in Hawaii is overwhelming..." - that's just sloppy and pathetic. But it's just much, much worse:

Nelson suggests in her lede that Luke Scott "will require a deeper line of thinking" so that we may get past the simple perception that the Orioles outfielder is a "a right-wing nut, a borderline racist and a loudmouth redneck ballplayer." And then she proceeds to write a remarkably detailed profile of a "a right-wing nut, a borderline racist and a loudmouth redneck ballplayer" who keeps pistols in his couch cushions. She devotes approximately 3,490 words to a story about an ignorant asshole and 10 words to trying to convince both herself and her readers that he is anything but.

There is nothing especially wrong with being a colossally ignorant asshole; baseball, and the world, is full of them. It's not Luke Scott's job to be a sensitive guy, and it's not his job to be informed about anything other than how to play baseball. But nor is it an ESPN reporter's job to mislead her readers in what, to these eyes, looks like a clumsy attempt not to offend the sensibilities of some of them.

So, congratulations - the douchenozzle of the week, month and potentially year goes to ... NOT Luke Scott, but Amy Nelson of ESPN! That's solid work for so early in the season. 


Good on ya, mate.

A Sad And Beautiful Fact

I've seen folks linking to this but I finally got a chance to read The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're Going To Miss Almost Everything by Linda Holmes, and ... it's sad and beautiful, and most importantly well stated:

The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore.  

This is the plight of idiots like me, who buy books about what other books to read, who fill bookshelves with more and more books, load up their TiVo's and Netflix queues and never seem to make that much progress... but, as Linda Holmes continues, this isn't a bad thing:

It's sad, but it's also ... great, really. Imagine if you'd seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you're "supposed to see." Imagine you got through everybody's list, until everything you hadn't read didn't really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.

If "well-read" means "not missing anything," then nobody has a chance. If "well-read" means "making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully," then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we've seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can't change that.

I can live with this.

Quick Hits: Books I've Just Read

A quick run-down/review of the last few books I've read:

After some relatively heavy books, I decided to see what all the fuss was about The Hunger Games trilogy. While I can't say I loved the books, it's worth noting that I read all three books - The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay - in about four or five days. That's worth something - and the story is telling if a mild ripoff of Battle Royale: It is the future, in what used to be the United States. The new country (called Panem) is comprised of the Capitol and 12 surrounding colonies, who essentially produce materials, product and resources for the Capitol. As punishment for an earlier rebellion, every year a boy and a girl from each colony is selected at random to play in The Hunger Games - a contest the rest of the country is forced to watch - in which the winner is the last surviving member. That is, 23 children will die, while one lives.

Meet the new Katniss.

The protagonist, Katnis Everdeen, is thrown into the Hunger Games and the rest of the books follow a logical if especially entertaining path. She's a very good character - strong-willed, creative and someone you root for - and the supporting characters are also compelling. I'm not sure about the fact that Jennifer Lawrence has been cast as Katnis - she's a great actress (from Winter's Bone) - but she doesn't actually look anything like the character. I don't think folks will complain. There's humor thrown in here and there, but at it's root, perhaps obviously, the books are pretty dark.

If I have a complaint about the books, it is that they are dark without being deep. These aren't new themes, the dystopian future and all that - but author Suzanne Collins clearly decided to not dive too deeply. There are much more interesting themes to explore, but these books are made for young adults, and it shows. Since that's the audience, I can't lay fault anywhere, but I would have enjoyed them a great deal more if they'd been a little meatier.

Ratings: Hunger Games: 7.5/10.0; Catching Fire: 7.0/10.0; Mockingjay: 7.5/10.0

So, looking for something with more substance, I decided to read Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt For His Assassin by Hampton Sides. Mission accomplished! This is actually a fantastic account (by the author of Ghost Solidiers) of MLK's assassination, James Earl Ray and the manhunt that ensued, which I basically knew nothing about. A few years ago I read Manhunt, which is the same basic structure around Lincoln's assassination, and I ate it up. The same is true here - I knew very little about Ray (and in fact, he went by the name Eric Galt before the killing and is referenced here as that initially), nor where he hid after the murder.

If I have any complaint, it is in what simply isn't known about Ray - and that's mainly exactly why he did it. He was a virulent racist, and a criminal - but there's no damning evidence, and there is hints that a larger conspiracy existed (bounties from Southern businessmen, etc.) that obviously are not possible to explore further. That's not Sides' fault, just a flaw in the narrative. It's highly engaging, but it's never quite riveting in the way that Ghost Soldiers and Manhunt were. I did enjoy it a lot and recommend if if you want to learn more about a horrible event in our countries past.

Rating: 8.0/10.0

I have a rule - if you are a comedian and you write a book, I'm probably going to read it - Adam Carolla, Sarah Silverman and Patton Oswalt all wrote books I've read in the last year. Guess what? I didn't much like any of them (though Carolla's was the best). So, since David Cross wrote a book called I Drink for a Reason, I'm in - and guess what? I sort of hated it.

It's not really funny, and while it somewhat seems like Cross' voice (when he really goes off the rails, at the least), I sort of expect a book by a comedian to feel like an extended version of his or her act. I really can't recommend this book - in fact, I never finished it. I am sure that Cross worked on it diligently - he doesn't seem like the kind of person who would do anything else - and there are moments I enjoyed .. but not enough to keep going. While I'm sure he did work on it, it feels like he mailed it in. And that's just not a very good thing.

Rating: Did Not Finish

The next book I read was Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky, a pretty much straight transcription of a road trip interview the author did with David Foster Wallace on his Infinite Jest book tour.

I'll have more to say about it as the book deserves its own full review, including a few quotes from the book itself, but frankly at this point I'm willing to take almost anything about Wallace, whose suicide two years ago still feels painful when you think of the genius lost.

Of course, that's why this book exists at all, and there are moments that probably felt trivial in 1996 that are positively haunting now. It's not quite a real book - it quite literally is a transcription with no real side commentary (and of that, I will have much more to say), but it's DFW, and it's good, and that's worth quite a bit.

Rating: 8.0/10.0


Note: This matters not except as a testament to my sloppiness, but I actually wrote this but apparently never published it, like three to four weeks ago. Thought you might possibly care.

Please Help Me Pull My Jaw Back

In which Greebs gleefully joins the ranks of those who think Keith Olbermann is a complete buffoon:

As even casual readers of this here blog could tell, my politics fall on the left side of the aisle and I think that so-called 'pundits' like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are some of the very worst elements of the national media. That said, while I agreed with some of Keith Olbermann's views (those I heard about), I almost never watched his program before he resigned (or was fired, or whatever). That kind of bolsterous "entertainment" is just nothing of the sort.

But Olbermann, of course, began in sports on ESPN and long ago started a blog for MLB that occasionally is interesting, so I have it in my Google Reader and sneak a peek from time to time. A lot of it is arcane but sometimes fun data, others are boring tales of him visiting the old Yankee Stadium before it was torn down.

Recently, he started doing a look ahead at the 2011 season, and I happened upon his preview of the NL West. Naturally, as a Giants fan, I was intrigued. The good? He picks the Giants to win the NL West, win a first round playoff game but lose to the Braves in the NLDS -- hey, it's not an insane prediction. But the following simply makes no sense to me:

But I must say this: the Giants are rapidly becoming one of the most disliked teams in baseball – and not just because of the silly boastfulness of the ring ceremony and the rest. No World Championship team has ever been feted by fans who have been worse winners than have the 2010 Giants. I mean Red Sox Nation didn’t gloat this much like this after ’04. It’s understandable that a franchise that saw that much frustration and even peril might continue to celebrate for years to come, but there is a reason they coined the phrase “act like you’ve been there before.”

Let's be clear - a Yankees fan is aghast at a team celebrating victory, and boasting about winning a single championship. If I had a dollar for every time a Yankees fan recited the number of World Series rings they had, I'd be a rich man - is that what acting like you've been there before means, Keith?

I lived in Manhattan for two years  - and one of them included the 1996 Yankees World Series win. That was the 23rd World Series ring the franchise had earned - and the city went insane. Keith Olbermann undoubtedly enjoyed the moment.

And what I remember most of all? (Well, actually I remember a grown man in a full Yankees uniform sobbing with joy and vomiting, and sobbing some more in a sports bar in Chelsea.) But on a longer term, I remember that Yankee fans started reminding me - whether it was relevant or not - that they'd won 23 championships, not the 22 they'd been yammering about the year before.

Hey, they had suffered - it had been eighteen years since their last championship - they missed the entire 1980's, right? (For comparison, of course, the Giants had 56 years in between championships, and had never once won as the San Francisco Giants. But why should details matter here?)

And you know what I thought about Yankee fans then? I loved it. That's what sports are about, and while Yankee fans are only a few steps above Cowboys or Dodgers fans, when you support a great franchise, you get to have some bluster. And you sure as hell enjoy every minute of a championship, because even with great teams, they are fleeting and rare. As a 49ers fan, I've surfed that wave plenty. (Sigh.)

Suck it, Keith.

So, to hear Olbermann tell others to act like they've been there before is among other things, a serious case of horse blinders, it's also kind of confusing. Because ... is this really a national opinion of the Giants? I'm obviously insulated to this out here in the Bay Area, but ... really? Are people aghast at the Giants continuing to celebrate their World Series trophy? If so, I neither have heard it nor understand it.

I'm fairly sure that if you took a national poll of who the most annoying fans are, you'd find answers that included the Yankees, Phillies, Red Sox and perhaps justifiably the Dodgers. I'm possibly crazy but I have to think that at the highest, the Giants finish fifth on a list like that and probably much farther down.

It's possible that I'm wrong. But it's a sure damn thing that Olbermann is.