I've used this pic four years running, and if it was good enough for 2008, dagnabbit, it's good enough for 2012

Every year around this time, I entreat you, the Scratchbomb reader, to consider donating some funds to WFMU, the Fun 91, the Freeform Station of the Nation. That time is upon us again.

WFMU does not get any money from the government (federal, state, local, what have you), nor does it get any money from corporations. It also refrains from constantly begging for money throughout the year a la PBS. WFMU has but one two-week pledge marathon that raises the bulk of their operating costs for the year. That is why it is crucial to add your support at this time.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but radio in the New York area is bad. Like, really bad. Atrocious, one might say. For a city that likes to think it’s the Center of Everything, particularly when it comes to the arts, New York’s radio stations are unlistenable, robotically programmed swill. WFMU is an island of goodness amid this raging sea of garbage.

Because they are not owned by some huge Conglomco, and because they are not beholden to any taskmasters governmental or corporate, WFMU gets to do whatever the hell it wants (within FCC confines, of course). I don’t love everything I’ve ever heard on WFMU, but I do love the fact that all of it is made by real humans who love music and radio, which definitively cannot be said for everything else on the airwaves.

I first started listening to WFMU well over a decade ago. A roommate turned me on to Terre T’s Cherry Blossom Clinic, which was exactly the kind of punk/garage/glam show I’d been searching for my entire life to that point. I made my first WFMU donation to her show when I was still powerfully, crushingly unemployed, because I believed in it that much, and if I couldn’t share what little money I had with something that made me that happy, well, what was the point of money anyway?

I still love Cherry Blossom Clinic and listen every Saturday I can; in my push to complete my novel over the last few months, I probably wrote 75 percent of it listening to Terre T. And so I feel somewhat indebted to WFMU for providing me with a soundtrack to my industry.

WFMU is also home to The Best Show, which is not only one of the funniest things humans have ever done, but which would be impossible on any other station. To do the kind of humor that Tom Scharpling does on that show–be it sparring with callers, chatting with guests, or performing comedy with Jon Wurster–requires large swaths of time that other spots on the dial would never allow in a million years. Even if you don’t listen to The Best Show, chances are you enjoy some form of comedy that has taken inspiration in some way from The Best Show. (SNL, for instance, counts many Friends Of Tom among its writers and performers; peep Bill Hader’s t-shirt in this video for visual evidence thereof.) That alone makes it, and WFMU, worthy of your attention.

I’ve volunteered for WFMU events for last few years and it is always a joyous experience. I am not blessed with a huge amount of free time, but I make time for WFMU, because being a tiny piece of what makes it happen is so rewarding. For instance, two years ago, I got witness this bit of amazingness–a Nerd-Off between John Hodgman and Patton Oswalt–live and in person.

My wife and I will be assisting in The Best Show’s first marathon program this evening. We will also be donating funds in addition to our time, and if you have any change to spare, I urge you to do the same. If you can part with 5 bucks, I assure you it is appreciated. I’ve manned the phones at the marathon and received pledges at that level, and I can promise you that every little bit helps.

However, if you care to listen during tonight’s show (which will feature special guests Ted Leo and Julie Klausner) and care to donate $75 or more, you are entitled to the Hammer of the Gods Best Show Demon Summoning Pack, which includes:

• A Best Show magazine with contributions from such luminaries as John Hodgman, David Rees, Robert Popper, Michael Kupperman, and more, plus an interview with Michael Nesmith and many other awesome tidbits and treats.
• A flexidisc with an exclusive song from Kurt Vile
• A CD of brand new comedy from Scharpling and Wurster.
• A free download of the audio from last year’s Radiovision Conference panel, featuring Tom, Marc Maron, and Ira Glass.
• A new Best Show sticker! A Vance the Puppet stressball! Some other stuff, I bet!

If all of that ain’t worth $75, I don’t know what is.

High rollers can donate more and get premiums from other DJs, which are always fantastic; the premium CDs from Terre T, Rex, and Evan “Funk” Davies always contain some amazing vinyl finds you simply can not get anywhere else. Think you can just get anything from anywhere in our digital age? You are completely wrong, and WFMU’s DJ premiums prove it every year.

I believe I’ve made made my case. This concludes my annual plea on behalf of WFMU, one of my favorite things in the world, until next week when I bug you again during Marathon Week Two.

As far as the novel goes, it is 98 percent done. I’ve completed a second draft, and will soon begin a third so I can dot the i’s, cross the t’s, remove superfluous adverbs, and so on. However, all the really hard work (the actual writing of stuff) is done, and very soon I will send it out to the world and onto a slush pile near you. I am close enough to completion that I feel confident enough to tell the world the following facts about this novel:

1. The title is Love and a Short Leash.
2. It is a spy novel that involves baseball.

Speaking of baseball, the large-ish non-fiction thing I mentioned above involves The Great American Pastime and it too has been consuming me of late. I’ve been kinda squirrely about exactly what this thing is on Twitter and elsewhere. I realize that vagueness such as this is maddening and I apologize for that. Here is what I can say about it:

1. It is called Yells For Ourselves.
2. It is a multi-volume ebook about the 1999/2000 Mets, or rather, about the narratives and media perceptions thereof.
3. It will be available in a no-frills version and a souped-up version for the iPad that will include lots of extra goodies, the technical aspects of which I’ve (mostly) figured out.
4. More details will become available upon the official launch of YellsForOurselves.com. (Nothing there right now, really, except a “watch this space” notice and one of my favorite Mets-related pics ever.)

I am pursuing traditional channels to get my novel published. (Speaking of which, if you’re involved with traditional channels, hey, hit me up, wouldja?) The non-fiction book will be self-published, more or less to prove that the souped-up version is something can be done, from a technical standpoint.

The other big reason I’ve been delinquent in my posts here is because I’ve been writing for other sites. (Scratchbomb and I have an open relationship.) I realize this has endangered my goal for Scratchbomb to be the M*A*S*H of the Internet (“where hilarity meets brooding introspection!”). However, I’m pretty proud of the stuff I’ve done elsewhere of late. Apart from my regular stuff at Amazin’ Avenue (which should ramp up now that spring training is upon us). here’s where you could have seen me so far in 2012.

• Last Friday I eulogized Gary Carter at The Classical. The Kid was the first athlete I loved, and his death, while sadly unexpected, hit me hard. I hope did his memory justice here. On a less serious tip, I also took a look at how Ray Manzarek’s brought an otherwise fine HBO doc about John Wooden and the UCLA basketball dynasty to a screeching halt.
• For Vice, I penned a brief assessment of the Marlins’ home run monstrosity as a sign of the impending apocalypse. If you think that take is a bit hyperbolic, I assume you have not seen this thing.
• For Splitsider, I looked back at the Looney Tunes 50th Anniversary Special, possibly the greatest thing Bill Murray has ever done, if not humanity itself.
• Last but certainly not least, I’ve scribbled a few things for Low Times: a review of Mitch Miller’s prog record, and an in-depth study of which exact city was built on rock and roll. And if you’re not listening to the Low Times podcast, get on the stick, fella. I have to say the Worst Lyrics discussion with Ted Leo and DC Pierson is one of the funniest things I’ve heard in many a moon.

Will I be posting here with more regularity in the near future? Possibly. What I can promise is that if I don’t, I will definitely put up another post apologizing for not posting.

I have a small, select group of people who crossed a certain line with me and will never be allowed back into my good graces, barring a miracle. Chuck Klosterman is high on that list.

I was reminded of this when he threw up a piece at Grantland that pooped all over tUnE-yArDs for the crime of winning the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop Poll’s record of the year. It wasn’t so much his choice of target that bugged me as the methods used, and reasons behind aiming in that direction. Per Klosterman habit, the piece made feint, passive-aggressive stabs at its subject, qualifying all of his contempt behind insincere well-wishing for the creator of art he doesn’t like while implying the poor, misguided souls who profess to enjoy it are simply saying they do to bolster their elitist cred. Like much of Klosterman’s writing on music, it  was obsessed with the idea that critics might like things the average slob doesn’t.

Multiple Fire-Joe-Morgan-style takedowns of this post have already been penned, so I won’t attempt that. (I’m partial to this one by Scott Creney.) However, the tone and direction of his tUnE-yArDs hit piece reminded me of another, even more infuriating thing he wrote years ago, one that I believe he still deserves an enormous amount of grief for penning.

Back in 2002, Dee Dee Ramone and Robbin Crosby (late of the hair metal band Ratt) died within 24 hours of each other. The New York Times asked Klosterman to write a look back at both men for the “Lives They Lived” issue of their Sunday magazine (aka Guys Who Died This Year). Klosterman proceeded to pen one of the most rage-inducing, wall-punchingest things I’ve ever read in my entire life.

The premise of the piece (“The Ratt Trap”) is that Dee Dee’s death unjustly overshadowed Crosby’s because Ratt sold far more albums than The Ramones ever did. And no, that is not an ironic homage to the “More Money = Better Than” sketch from Mr. Show.

“The demise of Ramone completely overshadowed the demise of Crosby,” Klosterman wrote, “even though Crosby co-wrote a song (”Round and Round”) that has probably been played on FM radio and MTV more often than every track in the Ramones’ entire catalog.” In his view, The Ramones’ connection to a counterculture (punk) meant they received recognition that Ratt could never dream of because Ratt “seemed corporate and fake and pedestrian.”

Klosterman has always harped on the idea that we don’t afford populist entertainment the same attention and respect as “art.” Personally, I’d say we have the exact opposite problem these days. (Is there any TV show out there that remains un-reacpped?) But the biggest logical problem with Klosterman’s argument here–and the philosophy that runs through much of his writing–is that he when he argues on behalf of The Popular, he almost always chooses to celebrate Popular Stuff that is complete garbage.

Ratt was a terrible band. I know that’s a subjective statement, and if they’ve brought you happiness in your life, godspeed. But I would wager there isn’t a single person alive today who is listening to Ratt out of any impulse but nostalgia and/or irony. They “seemed corporate and fake and pedestrian” because they were corporate and fake and pedestrian. There’s no Vast Music Critic Conspiracy to keep Ratt off the radio. We’ve all just decided their time has passed.

You have to search long and heard in non-Internet channels to find anything Ratt-related to purchase, but I can still buy a Ramones t-shirt off the street. What does that say about which band is truly more popular? And ultimately, if selling more albums warrants more respect, we should all be writing essays about how Kenny G was a greater jazz musician than John Coltrane.

As bad as all this is, you have to wait for the last paragraph to read the real crusher.

I would argue that Crosby’s death was actually a more significant metaphor than Ramone’s, because Crosby was the first major hair-metal artist from the Reagan years to die from AIDS. The genre spent a decade consciously glamorizing (and aggressively experiencing) faceless sex and copious drug use. It will be interesting to see whether the hesher casualties now start piling up. Meanwhile, I don’t know if Ramone’s death was a metaphor for anything; he’s just a good guy who died on his couch from shooting junk. But as long as you have the right friends, your funeral will always matter a whole lot more.

First of all, I wasn’t aware that death was a metaphor competition, or that we had to assign grades of meaning to the context and societal import of everyone’s passing. But what’s even worse, reading this closer reminds you that Klosterman was essentially writing a dual eulogy in which he trashed one subject at the expense of another.

If you want to write a piece about how Ratt is a million times better than The Ramones, that’s your prerogative. Is it asking too much that you wait to do it after you’ve written an obituary about one its members? Could you have exercised your anti-intellectual muscles after writing a piece that’s supposed to mourn its subject? I have literally seen terrorists written up in “The Lives They Lived” issue who received more flattering write-ups than Dee Dee Ramone. He deserved much better.

That is how you made The List, Chuck Klosterman, and you ain’t getting off any time soon.

This is seriously one of my favorite hours of television ever and it will become yours, too, once you watch it. I COMMAND IT.

I can’t tell you exactly why she likes to do this, but like most of her weirdness, it’s probably my fault. For years, I would bug my wife with questions about how to say this, that, and the other thing in Spanish. As an alternate means to expand my vocabulary, one meant to prevent my wife from murdering me, I began to watch Simpsons DVDs with the Spanish audio track on and Spanish subtitles. This was where I learned such valuable words as chuleta, salchicha, and trasero.

I’m sure my kid saw me doing this at some point in her formative years, because when she was very little, “Simpsons” was her catch-all word for “cartoons.” Now, she now gets really annoyed if she’s watching a DVD only to discover it doesn’t have a Spanish language track. Between DVDs, DVRs, and OnDemand, she lives in a world that denies her nothing. Healthy!

As I am still learning Spanish myself, I’ve been encouraging this curious proclivity of hers. The Harry Potter films are the ones she likes to watch in Spanish most often. (This is how I learned that cicatriz is scar and varita is wand; “muggle” is still “muggle.”) But last night, she asked to watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in Spanish. To call this an experience would be a gross understatement.

Here are some highlights of the bilingual discoveries I made while viewing this classic film en español.

• Willy Wonka’s Spanish subtitles translated “scrumdiddlyumptious” as “rechupeteanchus.” The audio had a completely different nonsense word that I couldn’t discern because I was laughing too hard.
• The lyrics to the songs were all rewritten and performed anew. Grandpa Joe’s big number, “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket,” became a tune called “Tengo un billeto de oro.”
• Charlie Bucket = Charlie Cubeta
• Augustus Gloop = Augustus Gluton
• Veruca Salt has a different name, too, but I couldn’t make it out. Also, I distinctly heard her introduce herself to Willy Wonka as Veronica Something, even though Wonka immediately uses Veruca when addressing her.

One thing that suffers in the translation is Willy Wonka himself. As far as I’m concerned, Gene Wilder is responsible for everything great about this movie, and removing his voice from the equation robs the film of some of that greatness.

However, there is one scene in the Spanish version that stands alone. It doesn’t surpass the original, but rather tears a whole in its reality and creates a new, terrifying universe unto itself.

I am speaking of the ultra-creepy boat scene. I will not attempt to capture exactly why this is so much more unsettling in Spanish. It defies explanation, and is something you need to experience. Think this scared the crap out of you before? That’s nothing compared to this. Once I saw it, my life was transformed, and now yours will be, too.

Rick Santorum possesses some vile views on gay rights and abortion (like thinking rape victims who get pregnant should just accept this “gift from god”), but he seems like such a brutally strange and damaged person that I’d pity him if he weren’t in such a position of power. Ron Paul seems sincere and I don’t disagree with his anti-war and anti-war-on-drugs stances, even if some his other positions bug me (not to mention his ugly newsletters, the racist content of which he’s never explained satisfatorily). Mitt Romney has the nonplussed cheesiness of a local news anchor.

All members of this trio possess varying degrees of harmlessness, as far as I’m concerned. So with Rick Perry out of the race, Gingrich stands above all of them as, hands down, the worst human being of the bunch.

Among them, Gingrich is the most eager practitioner of Bully Politics. This has been a feature of the Republican arsenal ever since Barry Goldwater and part of the general pushback against New Deal/Great Society ideals we’ve seen since those days. However, it’s never been practiced more brutally than now, and never more gleefully than by Newt. When he talks about making kids work as janitors, there is vengeance, and almost glee, in his voice. When he sneers at Juan Williams during a debate, he all but invites the riled-up audience to attack his outnumbered questioner and seems not too concerned about the consequences. He is never happier than when he attacks those can least defend themselves.

When Gingrich called Obama a “food stamp president,” it was an obvious dog-whistle statement. (Subtext: “Remember, guys, he’s BLACK. And he’s gonna give YOUR money to OTHER BLACK PEOPLE.”) But apart from the badly disguised racism, it was also part and parcel with the delight he takes from attacking the least of us, joyfully positing that the poorest among us are the most deserving of our scorn and ridicule.

Hearing this, I had an immediate, visceral, infuriated reaction, for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate at first. Yes, it was a reprehensible attitude, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on exactly it bothered me so much. And then it all flooded back to me, a memory I’d done my best to bury: My family was once on food stamps.

My dad drank himself out of a job by the mid 1980s and was completely unemployable for several years. My mom, who’d given up a career to raise me and my two brothers, was forced to reenter the workforce. Before she was married, she’d worked with computers (the punch-card kind). Now she worked in a picture frame factory. She might have been able to aim higher, but that would’ve required a long commute, and with three kids still in school and my dad out of commission, this wasn’t a possibility. The factory job was in our town and allowed her get out of work in time to be home when we got out of school.

My mom struggled with the idea of applying for food stamps, to the point of talking it through with me. (Being the oldest, I was her sounding board; she didn’t have many friends she could to turn to.) She came from a German Catholic background, which is a lot like Irish Catholic, only with slightly more guilt and a spartan work ethic. It is a background that tells you to keep your nose grindstone at all times, with an emphasis on self-reliance that bears a vague resemblance to the kind seen in North Korean propaganda.

The thought of asking for help to feed her family was humiliating. She told me what food stamps were and that she was considering applying for them. It sounded fine to me–we could get money for food? Sign me up. But my mother was very resistant. “If you do that, then the government OWNS you,” she said, in a voice mixed with anger and shame that I can still hear ringing in my head.”

Soon, though, she had no choice. My mother realized her pride wasn’t worth starving for, and that her job at the factory could only go so far. She cried when she went to social services to apply for the food stamps, humiliated, but she told me later that being parent means giving up a good chunk of your pride. (Now that I’m a parent myself, I concur.)

She absolutely hated using them. Back then, food stamps were still actual stamps, these comically large, dollar-bill-green things that came in checkbook-style perforated stacks. Ripping them out at the cash register at the local Grand Union killed her, I know it did. But she did what she had to do.

I still don’t know how my mother managed it, but through these lean years we never wanted for anything we truly needed. We had a roof over our heads and clothes to wear and, thanks to food stamps, three meals a day. We didn’t have a lot of “stuff” that our friends had, but we didn’t need a lot of stuff. Growing up this way made me appreciate the things I do have. Looking back on it, would my life have been appreciably better if I’d had the cable TV and the VCR and the Transformers I really wanted? I doubt it.

Eventually, my father sobered up and was able to work again. All told, we were only on food stamps a few months; we could have continued to apply for them, probably, but my mother dreaded another social services trip, and somehow we managed to get by on what we had until we were once again a two-income household.

Since I went through all this, when I hear Gingrich (or anyone else) imply that people on food stamps are just lazy bums who don’t want to work, it infuriates me. I would guess that most people on food stamps are in situations like ours: single parents (or essentially single parents, such as my mom) unable to work full time because of their children, who need the assistance to make ends meet. Our poverty was forced on us because my father had a disease, alcoholism. Of course, it was a disease that he was responsible for curing, and after a time he did. But before that happened, were we supposed to starve to teach my father a lesson? What did his children or his wife do to deserve the punitive world that Gingrich and his ilk wish to impose on us?

Let’s suppose for a moment that I’m wrong. Let’s say a significant number of food stamp recipients are lazy, really don’t want to work or make more out of their lives. Even if that’s the case, why are we angry at them, the lowest of the low? Do we really think they’re all carefree bacchanalians laughing at us dumb working slobs? No one on food stamps is having a great life. No one. I promise you that. Whatever they’re “getting over” the rest of us is so sadly infinitesimal, and the existence it subsists so undignified, it is not worth one iota of the anger directed toward it.

If we’re going to get mad at people who do nothing and suck off the public teat, why not get the pitchforks out for corporations who we had to bailout when they ran the economy into the ground? People who not only went unpunished, but are somehow collecting multimillion dollar bonuses now, even though their companies still aren’t profitable? In the grand scheme of things, who deserves more of your contempt? Who has impacted your life in a tangible, negative way?

Hating poor people is a sad fact of our modern culture. Whether it’s People of Wal-Mart or Shit [ETHNIC GROUP] Say or the opening episodes of any season of American Idol, our society is one that gets its kicks from laughing at the lowest man on the totem pole. In the 21st century, we find nothing more hysterical than the man who doesn’t realize how much he doesn’t have.

I don’t know if Newt Gingrich has struggled in his life, but he clearly knows how to tap into the psyches of those who have. He knows there are people in his audience who have asked for help in times of need from family members, friends, maybe even the government, too. And now, having survived those hard times, they want to deny that help for others, as if this will somehow blot up the embarrassment and shame they feel. It is an anger and resentment borne of the shame of having been there, and the fear of winding up there again.

I still feel embarrassed and almost guilty to even remember the fact that we were on food stamps. Even the construction we use–on food stamps–implies shame, as if you could be “on” them the same way addicts are “on drugs.” Prior to writing this post, the number of people who know we were on food stamps could be counted on one hand. I never talk about it, and I would guess even my closest friends, maybe even some of my extended family, don’t know about it.

I even asked my mother if it was okay to write about this, because I didn’t want to embarrass her or dig up any bad memories. In retrospect, she says food stamps were “great,” because they helped us survive. But she also remembers the sting of having to rip them out and use them, and how that pride kept her from reapplying when we could have used the help a little longer. It’s this odd feeling of knowing you have nothing to be ashamed of, yet never, ever wanting to talk about it or even think about it ever again.

So I don’t condone this harsh view of public assistance, though I do understand it, because I’ve been there, and I know the impulse to push those feelings far, far away. Gingrich, however, is a monster for exploiting it. In a just world, we’d save our shame for allowing him to get as far as he has.

See, back when I converted my site from Movable Type to WordPress, I had to do so in a weird way so I didn’t wipe out all my old stuff. This necessitated writing a bazillion redirects so that any old links would point to the new pages, not the old ones.

Well, it seems that I totally forgot about this when I moved to a new host. The new host is not yet set up with all these redirects. Every post since 2006 is in the “system,” so to speak, but if you have an old URL for anything on this site (pre February 2011 or so), it will probably give you a “Can’t find that page, yo” message.

The good news is, my new host can do redirects a lot easier than my old one, where I literally had to go into the htaccess file, type out the redirect, and hope I didn’t destroy my site by accident. The bad news is, there are still four-plus years of posts that I need to do this for.

I’ve already done this for all of the 1999 Project posts, plus a few others that I know get consistent traffic. I will work my way back and eventually get through all of them. Again, everything that ever appeared on Scratchbomb (the post-2006 blog version, anyway) is here, up and available for your bemusement. Just a heads up that if you have an old link, it may not work for the next couple of weeks or so.

Of course, if you have one of those old links, you won’t be able to read this note. In which case, thank you for allowing me to waste everyone’s time.

The biggest reason is due to me writing a bunch of stuff for other places–be it at Amazin’ Avenue or the kinds of links you can see to your right (under MC Elsewhere). But there was another reason.

See, this site had been hosted by Go Daddy for a while. I can’t tell you why I chose them to begin with; perhaps I was swayed for their TOO SHOCKING FOR TV! ads. In any case, once you sign up with a host, it’s very, very easy to just stick with them until kingdom come. I even renewed my hosting account with them late-ish last year.

Then the safari kerfuffle happened, which caused many people to jump ship. I thought the whole thing was despicable, too, but I also thought I simply didn’t have the time to make a move. I felt stretched thin with my work, non-work, and family obligations, and adding a project like this to the pile seemed like pure insanity to me. I went through such an enormous hassle moving this site from Movable Type to WordPress in early 2011 that I didn’t have the stomach or the will to go through (what I assumed would be) a similar ordeal again. I felt crappy about my lack of action, but not so crappy that I did anything about it.

Then, SOPA. I’m sure you know what that is by now, and if you don’t, frankly, you don’t deserve to be on the internet. Suffice to say, Go Daddy was one of many high profile corporations who voiced support of SOPA, which I am one billion times against. I’m aware that A) SOPA is now dead, and B) Go Daddy eventually stepped back from their stance. However, they did so in such a tepid way you can easily see them changing their mind about this issue yet again when it’s convenient.

Because of SOPA and Go Daddy’s stance thereon, many people took their sites to greener pastures. And now, I was even busier than I was when Go Daddy did their last reprehensible thing. The pressure to make the move had never been greater, and the time available in which to do it had never been shorter.

One thing I keep harping on in my online writing (particularly at AA) is the media; specifically, their perceptions, their narratives, and the way they deal with the news. One thing that drives me nuts is how often members of the media take a certain tack because it’s the path of least resistance. Rather than investigate what is actually going on or the historical roots of whatever might be happening, they simply tap into what they think is going on, or what they think people will want to hear, because they’re lazy.

I realized that the longer I continued to host my site with Go Daddy, the closer I became to being one of Those People. I don’t have a right to criticize cheap expediency in others if I continue to support a company I disagree with immensely simply because I fear the hassle involved with leaving. Plus, there’s every reason to think I will be exponentially more time-crunched in the future. If I didn’t make a move now for schedule reasons, things are unlikely to improve on that front any time soon.

So I deliberately scaled back on the writing I did here at Scratchbomb, because I didn’t know how long the move would take and I didn’t want to add more stuff to the pile of things I needed to transfer. And because the less I wrote here, the less traffic I drove Go Daddy’s way.

Then I researched what it would take to get the transfer done, and it turned out it wasn’t that huge of a deal after all. So I got a new web host, moved my site over, and voila. There were a few hiccups along the way, but all were resolved in fairly short order. Now, the site you’re looking at is no longer hosted by Go Daddy. It all took way quicker than I thought, which makes me angry with myself for not doing it sooner.

I have to send enormous thank yous to Jeff Lyons, who walked me through the finer points of moving a WordPress site and answered way more questions than he really had to. He helped a lot back when I transferred my site from Movable Type to this environment, and he helped just as much now. I continue to be grateful.

It’s a small thing, really, which I should have taken care of much sooner than I did. But now it’s done, and I can write about the laziness and hypocrisy of others with a clean conscience. It’s a nice feeling.

That’s because the Soundtrack Series is also a podcast. So you can now listen to my harrowing tale of how I won a Major Award, and the evil role played therein by John Phillip Sousa’s stirring march “El Capitan.” You can subscribe to the podcast here (I recommend all other episodes as well). If you’re one of those people who doesn’t do iTunes for some reason, stroke your Amish beard thoughtfully, then scoot over to the Soundtrack Series site, where you can listen to my story in the webbed browser of your choice and download the track for future safekeeping.

If you’re wondering about the stray noise in the background, the show took place in the downstairs bar at Le Poisson Rouge while an enormous burlesque show of some kind went on upstairs. Though it occasionally can be heard in this recording, I didn’t hear any of this when it happened because I was in the ZONE (of sheer terror and wanting to be loved). Enjoy!

I apologize that my Hall of Fame column came later than usual this year. I actually handed in my ballot at the last minute. I was searching all over the house for it, then my wife told me she lost it. And while she told me she lost it, she lit the ballot on fire right in front of me. I told her tampering with a Hall of Fame ballot was a federal offense. She said it wasn’t at all and that she was leaving for Ibiza for two weeks with her special friend Marco.

Luckily, I was able to send my choices in by teletype. It’s good to know that the BBWAA still uses the latest technology. Do you know it took me forever to find a teletype machine in my newspaper’s office? And when I did, it was covered in dust, banana stickers, and somebody growing a potato in a jar. When I started in this business, we used teletype to send info back to the newsdesk, and as far as I’m concerned, no machinery has improved on it since. You can keep your Blackberrys and iPans and whatnot. Also, my editor won’t let me get one because the last time I was issued a company cell phone, I gummed up the keys with Mallomar residue.

When Jack Morris failed to get into the Hall of Fame yet again, I poured out a bottle of Yoo-Hoo in his memory. In truth, I knocked over a bottle of Yoo-Hoo onto the hood of my editor’s car, but I retroactively dedicated it to his memory. That and the sizable repaint bill, which is coming out of my paycheck. I had no idea Yoo-Hoo was so caustic.

It’s too bad that we’re letting so many people vote for the Hall of Fame that didn’t watch some of the eligible candidates play. If you look at Morris’s pure numbers, of course he doesn’t belong within a mile of Cooperstown. In order to understand his greatness, you had to have seen him in action, and then remembered that action many, many years later, when most of the finer details are rather hazy in your memory and mixed up with other things you’ve seen on TV. I, for one, will never forget that time I saw Morris pitch a 15-inning complete game and knock in the winning run to save an inner city rec center, aided only by his grit and determination and most of the Harlem Globetrotters.

I truly believe that you can only judge a player if you’ve actually seen him on the field, preferably from a press box view, while ingesting a Skitch Special. That’s when you anchor two hot dogs and a hamburger together with a shish kebab skewer, then drop it into a deep fryer. Some stadiums were better than others in making it for me. The guys at Wrigley were the best; they’d always have two Skitch Specials waiting for me when I showed up at game time, along with a fully charged defibrillator.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite players was Jimmy “Shoebox” O’Leary, backup utility man for the Senators. No one really knows how he got that nickname; some say it’s because he was born in a shoebox, others say it’s because he lived in one. I can’t tell you now why he was my favorite player back then. His batting average always hovered around the Mendoza Line, he couldn’t field worth a lick, and he got a nosebleed every time he ascended the dugout steps.

Still, I thought he was the greatest player in the world when I was six, and to honor that memory, I vote for his induction into Cooperstown every year. My fellow writers keep telling me I’m insane, that he’s not on the ballot, and that they’re going to drum me out if I don’t stop doing this and also bringing my homemade scrapple to the meetings.

If I’m disappointed that Morris failed to get in, that’s how pleased I am that Jeff Bagwell was also denied. As I’ve discussed before, there’s no hard evidence Bagwell ever did steroids, or soft evidence, or even some sort of evidence-mist. However, he did play at a time when many other people may or may not have done steroids at some point or another, and the fact that he didn’t speak up about it is a mark against his character. If someone was around that much cheating at that time and said nothing, they’re just as guilty as those who committed the act. If there’s anything I’m sure of after spending most of the last 30 years in locker rooms, it’s this.

I’m not looking forward to next year’s ballots, full of proven cheaters like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, cheaters by association like Mike Piazza…now that I think about it, it will be easier to vote than ever before. I’ll just draw a huge frowny face on my ballot, check off Morris, write in Shoebox, and be done with it. More time for homemade scrapplin’.

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And now it’s time for Some Things I Think About Things I Think!

• Tim Tebow has brought joy back to the NFL. Anyone who says something bad about him should be caged.
• In this strike-shortened season, the play in the NBA has really fallen off, based on what I assume from not having watched a single game so far.
• Love him or hate him, Shia LeBoeuf is here to stay, folks.
• I’ve started an online petition to keep egg nog lattes at Starbucks all year round. I have 12 signatures, each from someone named Mike Rotch.
• Alex Ovechkin is going to have to do a lot more to get my attention. Like play a sport other than hockey.
• I don’t care for that “Partying Rock” song by L.S.M.F.T. Give me the Little River Band any day of the week.
• Albert Pujols’ decision to leave St. Louis for the glamor of Hollywood is truly selfish, as it means I will probably have to drive from LAX to Anaheim several times this upcoming season.
• Insider’s tip: Take a bag of microwave popcorn, poke a tiny hole, pour M&Ms inside, and seal it up before you pop. The result is a delightfully gooey mess and it tastes a bit like metal.
• Have you guys heard about radishes? Crazy!
• Stayed up late last night to watch a few old episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati. I really think that show holds up, and the roaring laugh track really helped mask the sounds of Marco and my wife upstairs.
• Treat yourself to some fried spaghetti this week. You’ll thank me.