All posts by Matthew Callan

Baseball, Sean from Massapequa

Fanning the Flames: K-Rod

I often write about the Mets on this site, but I realize that my perspective is not necessarily that of the average fan. So as the Hot Stove League heats up, I want to get the viewpoint of another Amazins enthusiast. Today Scratchbomb welcomes Sean from Massapequa, a union pipefitter and frequent WFAN caller, to discuss the acquisition of Francisco Rodriguez.
 
seanfrommassapequa.jpgSo the Mets got K-Rod. That should help solidify the bullpen, shouldn’t it?

I don’t want this guy nowhere near my team! This guy’s a bum! Get ridda him!

He’s been on the team for like six hours.

That’s six hours too long! That bum should hit the road!

How is K-Rod a bum? He broke the season saves record last year.

Big deal. Saves is a fake stat, like on-base percentage. They don’t mean nothin. He’s a bum and the Mets are bums for signin him. That’s just like the Mets, always thinkin small. Meanwhile, the Yankees go out and get CC Sabathia and steal the back pages again. How could Omar Minaya let Sabathia slip through his fingers?! I want that bum fired!

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Self-Righteous Rants, The Funny

Jay Leno and the Persistence of Mediocrity

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There are times when I feel profoundly disconnected from humanity. Like, I operate on a completely different wavelength than the rest of the world. These moments tend to occur whenever I turn on the TV. Or read anything online. Or leave the house.

I realize this is an extremely childish and narcissistic POV. Everyone feels different–Free to Be You and Me taught me that. Well, that and the inherent creepiness of baby puppets.

But how am I supposed to feel, gentle reader, when I’m told that the entire world is all a-twitter at the news that Jay Leno will host a 10pm talk show, and I think to myself, Wow, Jay Leno still exists?

I mean, seriously, people are excited about this? No one has ever been excited by anything Jay Leno has ever done. I challenge you to convince me otherwise.

leno.jpgI still don’t understand how Jay Leno got to be Johnny Carson’s successor. Who let that happen? Shouldn’t that have been reviewed by the Council of Things That Make No Damn Sense?

Johnny Carson was witty and urbane, a gifted comedian and a master interviewer. No one has ever used any of those words to describe Jay Leno, except prefaced with the word “not”.

People still talk about sketches Johnny Carson used to do on The Tonight Show. You see clips of his most famous celebrity interviews on TV all the time. Jon Stewart imitates him at least once a night. He remains the gold standard by which all late night fare is judged.

You think they’ll sell “The Best of Jay Leno” DVDs some day? Nope, and you will never say this to your grandkids:

Back in my day, we all used to gather ’round the television and watch The Jay Leno Program. I still remember the time he found a midget version of himself! And the time Kevin Eubanks pretended to laugh at his monologue for the 8 millionth time! Oh, it was magic!

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Technical Nonsense

Site Unseen

When I started Scratchbomb, intertubes technology was a fraction of what it is today. The phrase “blog” had not yet been coined. Comments and tags and trackbacks and the like were only a gleam in some codewriter’s eye. If you said that someday people would watch movies and TV shows online, you would have been burned as a witch.

I built Scratchbomb with my bare hands, with some help from Dreamweaver. HTML familiarity was pretty much the only thing you needed to make a site in them days. Times were simpler. People seemed to laugh more then.

But a blog must keep moving forward, or else it shall perish, much like the noble and bloodthirsty shark. I’ve realized that there are things a blog should be able to do that Scratchbomb couldn’t–most of them involving searchability. And I was investing far too much time making it do the few things that it could do–like making permalinks that I had to manually create and maintain.

So after a few days of wrestling with hosts and servers, I’ve converted Scratchbomb over to Movable Type. Without getting too technical, I assure you that it makes running the site a zillion times easier, in terms of writing entries, creating permalinks, etc. I used to have to do all of these things on my own, occasionally by writing code and uploading files via a steam-powered FTP application.

And thanks to the miracle of advanced nerd technology, Scratchbomb will finally be searchable and have tags and (gulp) comments. Yes, you’re welcome.

In the short term, that means the site has a tad generic look right now. In the coming weeks, I’ll be reconfiguring the design so it looks a little less Geocities.

I also plan on migrating the older entries into this new interface. For now, if you wanna look at the old site, click here.