All posts by Matthew Callan

Tuneage, Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: El Gran Combo

Pitchers and catchers are a mere five weeks away, and it can’t come soon enough for me (even after last night’s hideous Carlos Beltran news). I am done with winter this year, at a record pace, and I’m normally a cold-weather guy. Or at least more of a cold-weather guy than a hot-weather guy. The sun is not my friend.

grancombo.JPGSo from now until players report, I will have a daily bit of baseball-iana to get you through the rest of the winter. The inaugural submission comes to me courtesy of WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, via Give the Drummer Some. Yesterday, he put up his weekly post of mp3s, and it included a beisbol-centric jam by Puerto Rican musical legends El Gran Combo.

They’ve been around for almost 50 years and are probably the most famous salsa group in the world. This tune, entitled “El Caballero Pelotero”, is about exactly what its title states: a horse who plays baseball.

My Spanish isn’t good enough to translate all the lyrics to this song. Or even most of them. In fact, all I can really catch are the lines “jugaba a beisbol” and “los Yanquis”. But apparently, this horse was quite the hitter.

Still, it puts me in the baseballing mood, and I hope it does the same for you. In addition to the original audio below, you can also see/hear El Gran Combo playing the song with another salsa legend, Hector Lavoe, on YouTube (which I would have included here, except the sound is sub-bootleg quality).

Download here.
Baseball

Blast that Infernal Steroid Era!

mcgwire_milk.jpgI admit that I used steroids for over a decade. However, I want to assure all my fans that I only did it to recover from crippling injuries that would have ended my career, not to inflate my majestic home run numbers. Of course, by lengthening my career, I also hit far more home runs than I would have otherwise and wound up inflating my numbers anyway. It was such a vicious circle!

If only I hadn’t played in The Steroid Era! Then all of this unpleasantness could have been avoided! I wish I had a mentor when I was younger, someone who would’ve told me that if I played in The Steroid Era, there was a very good chance I’d do steroids. Darn this era! Darn it all to heck!

Maybe you don’t know this, but when a baseball player reaches the majors, he has a choice of what era he can play in. I couldn’t play in The Deadball Era, because nobody hit homers back then and nobody wore gloves and everybody gambled. I thought about The Babe Ruth Era, but I’ve never had the stomach for bathtub gin. I thought about The Postwar Era, but you couldn’t go to the World Series unless you played for the Yankees or the Dodgers. And The Sixties weren’t an option, because the pitchers had too much of an advantage; I think the mound was two stories high back then.

I know what you’re thinking: How can you pick an era to play in? You see, MLB mastered the space-time continuum in 1975, thanks to a joint effort between NASA and Bill Lee. The principles are complicated and probably boring to the average layman. Suffice to say that the linearity of time is merely an illusion. I could have played 600 years in the future if I wanted to, in The BRX-797-0 Era, but I thought telepathic abilities would take a lot of the mystery out of life, you know?

So while I’m definitely sorry for what I did, I think most of the blame lies squarely on The Steroid Era itself. Perhaps this not-easily-defined span of time needs to do an interview with Bob Costas and explain itself, not me!

I want to thank all of the people who’ve been supportive during this difficult time. My family. Tony LaRussa. The entire St. Louis Cardinals family. And of course, all those baseball writers who urged me to unburden my soul. Your pushing, poking, and prodding gave me the strength to come clean. I’ll never forget you, but I will try to forget all of you weeping and gnashing your teeth because I just did exactly what you wanted me to.

In conclusion, I think the time has come to turn the page and once again start blaming the big black guy for all this unpleasantness.

Adtacular, Boob Tubery

Dominos’ New Shame-Based Menu

dominos.gifWe know that our customers have been complaining about our pizza for years. That’s why we’re taking steps to make Domino’s better. And the first step to getting better is to admit you have a problem.

So we’ll be the first to admit our food is not the best. In fact, it’s pretty horrible. In all honesty, we’ve served you the worst garbage imaginable for decades. We are not legally allowed to refer to Domino’s Pizza as food in 23 states. We wouldn’t feed a starving war criminal the swill we try to pass off as pizza. If you knew half the stuff we put in our sauce, you would beat us within an inch of our lives, and no jury would convict you.

That’s why we gathered all our test kitchen chefs together to give them all of your helpful feedback. We locked them in a windowless, unlit room and projected that feedback randomly on the walls for 15 hours, while “The Flight of the Valkyries” blared at half speed with extra bass boost from enormous speakers. The cooks came out of this experience with a renewed commitment to excellence, at least the few who weren’t driven to the brink of madness.

This brainstorming session also enabled our chefs to tap into some childhood trauma and humiliation that had previously been buried deep within their psyches. And those repressed experiences have provided the inspiration for our brand new menu!

  • Try our new buffalo chicken pizza! The improved blue cheese dressing was the brainchild of chef Greg Sanchez, whose mother threw a full jar of mayonnaise at him in frustration when he was only 6 years old. This incident is deeply imprinted on his brain and is probably the source of his frequent, uncontrollable fits of rage. Comes with a free order of mozzarella sticks!
  • Who doesn’t love the spicy, tangy taste of the Southwest? Chef Marty Bellows doesn’t! He’s still scarred from when his parents took him to a Mexican restaurant and he accidentally peed his pants, but wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom and dry himself off. He still has body image issues and difficulty trusting others. But we trust you’ll love his barbecue chipotle pizza!
  • If you like a more traditional pizza, you’ll love our improved sauce, made with fresh tomatoes, garlic, cilantro, and other hearty ingredients. It’s all thanks to the hard work of chef Denise Russo, or rather her overbearing neat-freak mother, who scolded her when she stained her bedsheets with her first period!

We know you’re gonna love our new menu! Because if you don’t, we’re making our cooks march around the corporate office in their undies!