All posts by Matthew Callan

Life In These United States, Self-Righteous Rants

Epic Fail: Lunch Edition

Today I ate the worst sandwich ever made. I am sure of it.

Sure, Turkish prison food is probably worse, if Midnight Express is any indication. I bet there’s some street food in Mumbai or Caracas that’ll make you doubt the existence of God. In a purely qualitatively way, this sandwich was not worse than these things, or any other filthy comparison you could conjure up.

This was the worst sandwich ever made in the way that Plan 9 from Outer Space and Manos: The Hands of Fate are the worst movies ever made. There are worse movies, but their failure is not compelling. Plan 9 and Manos fail in such grotesquely unique ways that you can’t help but watch the whole cinematic train wreck.

Ever head home really late after drinking too much, but by the time you get home you’re starting to sober up? So you decide wolf down some food before you go to bed so you won’t have too bad of a hangover the next morning? And while you’re waiting for a Hot Pocket to heat up in the microwave, you turn on HBO and they’re showing The Wicker Man? And you sit down and watch it, and you find out it’s even more insane in non-You Tube form?
So you stay up way, way too late, knowing you’re going to totally feel like shit at work the next day, because you just have to see how Nicolas Cage is gonna up the retard quotient in scene after scene?

If so, you will understand me when I say that this sandwich was so monstrously awful that I had to keep eating it.

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Parental Guidance

No Matter Who Wins, We Lose

While staying at my mother’s house over the weekend, my baby daughter woke up screaming in the middle of the night, completely inconsolable. She was wailing in a desperate and terrified way completely unfamiliar to me. And there was nothing I could do to make her stop, which gave me the worst feeling a parent can have: powerlessness. If you can help it, you don’t want your child to realize you’re completely worthless until they’re at least 10 years old.

Cry Recognition is one instinct you develop pretty early on your parental career. Like a car nut who can tell the model of classic wheels based on the sound of the engine, a parent can tell what their child wants based on the style and timbre of their cries. There are subtle yet important differences in a baby’s cry when she’s wet and a baby’s cry when she’s hungry. Or a baby’s cry when she just feels like crying and waking up everyone in the house. Babies are real dicks sometimes.

I tried whispering soothing things and I tried singing to her but she refused to even open her eyes. So I walked her into the bathroom, hoping that she’d see herself in the mirror and realize she was with her father and everything was okay. But that didn’t work either. So I finally decided to take her out to the living room and put on some kiddie show she likes. I felt like watching Teletubbies at 2 in the morning about as much as I felt like stabbing myself in the eye with a cocktail toothpick, but these are the sacrifices you make for your children.

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Skitch Hanson, Sports

Up the Middle with Skitch Hanson: Fine China

Today, Scratchbomb hands over the reins to nationally syndicated sports columnist Skitch Hanson, as we’ve done many times before. You may know him as the author of the highly popular syndicated column “Up The Middle.” You may also have read his best-selling book Ebbetts Field and Johnny Unitas: Why Everything Good in Sports Has Already Happened. He’s also a frequent guest on ESPN’s sportswriters panel show I Disagree With You. Without further ado, here’s Skitch.

Greetings from Beijing! Or should I say, “How Knee”! That’s how they say “hello” here in China, which is where I am, covering this year’s Summer Olympian Games! It’s so exciting to cover a special event such as this, something I look forward to so much every year! Except for those years when there aren’t any Olympics.

It took some doing to get here, of course. I had to convince my editor that I would actually do some work on this trip and not spend the whole time consumed by my favorite off-hours hobby. But I assured him that China would give me very few opportunities to collect Lawrence Welk memorabilia.

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